In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms their life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of how one young writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity. Told in Myles's audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate by their lyrical language, Chelsea Girls weaves together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, their volatile adolescence, their unabashed "lesbianity," and their riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s and 80s New York.

An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word "pathetic" "Literature is pathetic." So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called "pathetic" or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone.Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of "pathetic" as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles's own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.

Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018 In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly made an indelible impact on the writer's way of being. Over the course of sixteen years together, Myles was devoted to the pit bull and their linked quality of life. And starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a playful and incisive investigation into the mostly mutually beneficial, sometimes reprehensible power dynamics between pet and pet-owner. At the same time, it reimagines Myles's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, intimacy and mourning, celebrity and politics, spirituality and family history, while joyously transcending the parameters of memoir. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles's childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from shimmering poetic transcriptions of video footage taken during their walks, to Rosie's final enlightened narration from the afterlife, this totally singular text combines elements of science fiction, screenplay, monologue, and lucid memory to get to the heart of how and why we dedicate our existence to our dogs.

A collection of thrilling verse, including both new poems and beloved favourites, from the celebrated poet, modern cult icon, and author of nineteen books including Chelsea Girls.

Eileen Myles' work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. At once intimate and open-hearted, her poems are a raw, complex and compelling diary of postmodern life and invite readers into astonishing new considerations of familiar settings, from the beginnings and ends of love and the imperatives of sexual desire, to the daily wonder of a poet's life in New York City and beyond - into lush-and sometimes horrible-dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

I Must Be Living Twice reflects Myles' sardonic, unapologetic, and freewheeling literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, I Must Be Living Twice is a prism refracting a radical world and a compelling life.

A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped her Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist's sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell's life, social circle, and surroundings. Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell's admirers and those just discovering her work. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 4, 2021-January 17, 2022) Baltimore Museum of Art (March 6-August 14, 2022) Fondation Louis Vuitton (October 5, 2022-February 27, 2023)

Traces the feminist icon Carolee Schneemann's prolific six-decade output, spanning her remarkably diverse, transgressive, and interdisciplinary expression Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was one of the most experimental artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book traces six decades of the feminist icon's diverse, transgressive and interdisciplinary expression through Schneemann's experimental early paintings, sculptural assemblages and kinetic works; rarely seen photographs of her radical performances; her pioneering films; and groundbreaking multi-media installations. Contributors shed new light on Schneemann's work, which addressed urgent topics from sexual expression and the objectification of women to human suffering and the violence of war. An artist who was concerned with the precarious lived experience of both humans and animals, this book positions Schneemann as one of the most relevant, provocative and inspiring artists in recent years. Published in association with Barbican Art Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Barbican Art Gallery, London (September 8, 2022-January 8, 2023)

Borrowing its name from the notorious '60s Ed Sanders magazine, "Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts," the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless. Contributors: Tanya Barfield, Dodie Bellamy, Adele Bertei, Lisa Beskin, Rebecca Brown, Kelly Cogswell, Dominique Dibbell, Shannon Ebner, Laura Flanders, Eliza Galaher, Marilyn Hacker, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Joan Larkin, Myra Mniewski, Honor Moore, Cynthia Nelson, Madeline Olnek, Nancy Redwine, Julie Regan, Annie Reid, Danine Ricereto, Camille Roy, Sapphire Joan Schenkar, Kathy Lou Schultz, Lucy Sexton, Linda Smukler, Pamela Sneed, Christina Sunley, Carmelita Tropicana, Claudia von Vacano, Laurie Weeks, Debra Weinstein, Joe Westmoreland, Millie Wilson, Linda Yablonsky.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work   “A sharply etched, unvarnished self-portrait.�—Kirkus Reviews   “[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.�—National Public Radio   "This is signature Myles: the unconventional syntax, the jazzy rhythms, the total commitment to writing in the heat of the moment, not edited or modulated by concessions to linear rationality."—Phil Gambone, Gay & Lesbian Review   In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.   For Myles, time’s “optic quality� is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019 New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018 This new book of poems and essays by Eileen Myles finds our game-changing writer keying lines in the euphoric style that the New York Times has called 'one of the essential voices in American poetry.' Following the critically claimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) and I Must Be Living Twice, their career-spanning selected poems, Evolution is Myles' first all-new poetry collection since 2011's Snowflake/different streets. These new poems upend genre in a vernacular that enacts, like nothing else, the way we speak (inside and out today). From walking around Marfa and New York City with an orange pit bull to Eileen's transcendent acceptance speech as President, Evolution lifts a can of Diet Coke as an End-of-the-World toast to embodiment, irreverence and risk.

Eileen Myles, the popular author of Chelsea Girls and Not Me, the poet who ran an openly female campaign for president in 1992, now gives us a talking masterpiece of a novel that scratches out and rewrites the picture of what fifty years of female life looks like today. Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. Cool For You's tough girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State.

Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Pinero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design-complete with 2-color interior-brings each of these unique documents and images to life. Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive-as well as hard to find-writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

The first all-new collection of poems since 2011's Snowflake/different streets--and following the critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as the volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice--here, in Evolution, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that enacts--like nobody else--the way we speak (inside and out) today. Evolution, with its channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones, radiates vital insight, purpose, and risk, like in these opening lines of the title poem: Something unearthly about today so I buy a Diet Coke & a newspaper a version of "me" something about me on the earth & its sneakers & feeling like the earth's furniture but that can't be true or like the coke & the Times it's true for a little while.

A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Bjoerk to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau's footsteps on Cape Cod Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city-wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit-seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her-and our-lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Bjoerk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

From its beginning—“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.â€�—to its end—“You can actually learn to have grace. And that’s heaven.â€�—poet, essayist and performer Eileen Myles’ chronicle transmits an energy and vividness that will not soon leave its readers. Her story of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and her own creative drive in the meditative and raucous environment that was New York City in its punk and indie heyday, is engrossing, poignant, and funny. This is a voice from the underground that redefines the meaning of the word.

"One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature--honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."--Dennis Cooper

" Myles' writing] comes across simultaneously as effortless and utterly gorgeous. . . . To be able to write with such gentleness and force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this."--Ron Silliman

Two books meet as one in legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles' newest collection. In a world overflowing with technology and its mutant offspring, moments of human ecstasy and connection are as indelible as they are fleeting. Indeed, with every page, the poems of "Snowflake" and "different streets" create poet and poem anew.

"some cars seem to erupt
from the tar itself
they seem to pull
themselves up
from below the surface of the land
though I don't think land. I mean something flat, something
black
almost like a water that we're on
though a dark water that
holds us."

Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. She was recently awarded the 2010 Shelley Memorial Award for poetry and, for her novel "Inferno," the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She lives in New York.

Boston born and bred, John Wieners was a queer self-styled poète maudit who was renowned among his contemporaries but ignored by mainstream critics. Twenty-first-century readers are correcting this elision, placing Wieners back alongside his better-known peers including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka. Wieners was a voluble letter writer, maintaining friendships with these contemporaries that spanned decades and tackling a range of complex issues that resonate today, including drug use, homosexuality, subcultures of the East and West Coasts, and the differing treatment of mental patients based on their economic class. The letters collected in this volume are greatly enhanced by Eileen Myles's preface and Stewart's thorough introduction, notes, and brief bios of the poets, writers, artists, and editors with whom Wieners corresponded. The result is more than the letters of a poet - it is a history that explores the world at large in the mid-twentieth century.

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York. The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

Celebrated photographer Catherine Opie (born 1961) has long documented the faces and landscapes of American communities, both inside and outside the mainstream. The subjects of her highly regarded portraits have ranged from California surfers, friends and fixtures in LGBT communities, high school football players and the artist herself. In this series of photographs documenting the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Opie broadens her focus to an expanded community of Americans: on January 20, 2009, over one million people gathered on the national mall to see the swearing in of America's first black president, united by their pride at what had been accomplished and a collective hope for the future. In the tradition of Robert Frank's photographs of the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and William Eggleston's 1976 "Election Eve" series, Opie's" Inauguration," a series of 100 photographs, offers an intimate political and personal view of one of the most public days of a nation. Accompanying texts by author, curator and photo-historian Deborah Willis and writer Eileen Myles address the significance of Opie's achievement with this body of work and further explore the wonder, elation and the self-conscious anticipations of this historic moment.