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claudiaruton's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
theyre doing a number on my style i’ll tell you that
lizawall's review against another edition
better than ever! i still can't understand how eileen myles turned from annoying to my hero but there it is.
blueberryhotel's review against another edition
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
eileen myles hive
uriah's review against another edition
3.75
i have discovered that i do in fact love confessional poetry
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.25
I'm not overly fond of confessional poetry, but Myles has taught me something about it or its evolution as a form. I've always thought that most of the most renowned confessional poets (Sexton, Plath, Snodgrass, Wylie, etc.) built in a line of artificiality or distance in the crafting of their lives to fit the sense of verse; too often that border was where experience passed into overly-conscious meaning.
Eileen Myles, to my eye, has all but erased that boundary. There is an unabashed intimacy to her work, not merely in its language which is often coarse and physical yet for moments falls naturally into coalescence. Abandoning syntax, Myles situates her persona in single spaces and allows her thinking to spin out (the yearning for a lover, a politician's speech, a cat descending the stairs, the smells of her body, the sky beyond her window). A casual reading may find little here but these autobiographical sketches--and indeed they exist, it seems, primarily for this--but we also witness the <i>how</i> of Myles's thoughts, the assemblage of ideas, the marking of priority, the slippages into the surreal or fantasy, the reasons these banal realities echo the opposite.
More (while I grabbed this work as a first read of hers because I could not easily select another place to start), <i>I Must Be Living Twice</i> offers a near-chronology of her published works from the 1970s to near-present (2015). Witnessing a condensation of this "fiercely intellectual" thinking (as described by others)--emerging, waning, waxing, sighing--across time is its own revelation.
Myles is unafraid of language, of experience, of self. Be prepared to encounter just about anything through the reading. There is so little pretended in this self-disclosure, even when it strays into longed-for fictions.
Eileen Myles, to my eye, has all but erased that boundary. There is an unabashed intimacy to her work, not merely in its language which is often coarse and physical yet for moments falls naturally into coalescence. Abandoning syntax, Myles situates her persona in single spaces and allows her thinking to spin out (the yearning for a lover, a politician's speech, a cat descending the stairs, the smells of her body, the sky beyond her window). A casual reading may find little here but these autobiographical sketches--and indeed they exist, it seems, primarily for this--but we also witness the <i>how</i> of Myles's thoughts, the assemblage of ideas, the marking of priority, the slippages into the surreal or fantasy, the reasons these banal realities echo the opposite.
More (while I grabbed this work as a first read of hers because I could not easily select another place to start), <i>I Must Be Living Twice</i> offers a near-chronology of her published works from the 1970s to near-present (2015). Witnessing a condensation of this "fiercely intellectual" thinking (as described by others)--emerging, waning, waxing, sighing--across time is its own revelation.
Myles is unafraid of language, of experience, of self. Be prepared to encounter just about anything through the reading. There is so little pretended in this self-disclosure, even when it strays into longed-for fictions.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcohol, Cursing, and Sexual content
Moderate: Toxic relationship
beatrice_k's review against another edition
4.0
Freewheeling and full of life. The best of Eileen and then some.
alexcreece's review against another edition
5.0
“I think writing
is desire
not a form
of it. It’s feeling
into space,
tucked into
language
slipped
into time,
opened,
felt.” (For Jordana)
Big love for this juicy selection of works!
is desire
not a form
of it. It’s feeling
into space,
tucked into
language
slipped
into time,
opened,
felt.” (For Jordana)
Big love for this juicy selection of works!