Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Lockport Public Library | 34094004441161 | 636.7559 MYLE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Niagara Falls Public Library | 34305011122531 | 636.7559 MYLE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... North Tonawanda Public Library | 34120006455907 | 636.7559 MYLE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Prolific and widely renowned, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work "set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match" ( New York Review of Books ). This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie.
In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer's life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog's wellbeing, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow (a dog memoir) launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet-owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles's experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief.
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 lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie's enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow (a dog memoir) illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog.
Author Notes
Eileen Myles is an American poet and writer born on December 9, 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston (1971). She moved to New York City in 1974 where she participated in workshops and worked with and for several famous poets. Her career includes working as Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, serving as Professor of Writing at the University of California, San Diego, and Visiting Writer at seven colleges.
Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash, was published in 1978. Some of her other work include A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains, Not Me, Inferno, Maxfield Parrish/early and new poems, School of Fish, Skies, On My Way, Snowflake / Different Streets, and The Importance of Being Iceland. She has also written articles, essays, plays and other works of fiction and nonfiction.
She founded the Lost Texans Collective with Elinor Nauen and Barbara McKay and performed in group and solo performances.
She has received numerous awards for her work. Her latest awards include The Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing (2015) and The Lambda Pioneer Award (2016).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and novelist Myles (Inferno) reflects on 16 years with their pit bull Rosie. Inspired by Rosie's death, Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy. The feeling of watching a beloved pet's decline is rendered bittersweet: "Our present had a pastness to it every day." There is humor, as the author recalls a fruitless attempt to breed Rosie ("I wondered if I was doing something illegal. Letting dogs have sex in my building"). There's a chapter written as the transcript of a surrealist puppet show, wherein Rosie informs the audience that she has been writing Myles's material since 1990. Myles also brings Hitler's art, 14th-century tapestries, and Abu Ghraib into the narrative, and writes in the voice of Bo Jean Harmonica, an alter ego of sorts whose gender is categorized pithily: "I'm a man but there's a woman in it." Though there are occasional meandering thematic digressions, these seem a part of the journey. Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For more than 16 years, Myles was companioned by a pit bull named Rosie until Rosie did what dogs do and left the author to navigate a post-Rosie world, solo. In the after of Rosie, poet Myles, the author of more than 20 books, including the novels Chelsea Girls (1994) and Cool for You (2000), writes this unconventional, uncontainable, phantasmagoric memoir of dog and owner. To let Rosie herself tell it, Afterglow is totally a book with legs (four if I can be dumb) so it will go a lot further than your earlier Eileen-based fictions. Here are small moments and large ones, like actual transcriptions of memories; here's Rosie as author, Rosie interviewed on a puppet talk show, Rosie as god, Rosie as Myles' father. Myles catalogs Rosie-related objects and chronicles the seeking of an ancestral home in Ireland and reading science fiction in San Diego during Rosie's last summer. Poetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin Press, $27.) The magic of Ng's second novel, which opens with arson and centers on an interracial adoption, lies in its power to implicate every character - and likely many readers - in the innocent delusion that "no one sees race here." DEFIANCE: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Anne Barnard, by Stephen Taylor. (Norton, $28.95.) Over the course of Taylor's biography, a picture emerges of Lady Anne Barnard as a cleareyed yet self-doubting woman determined to live life on her own terms even as she worried about her right to set those terms. AT THE STRANGERS' GATE: Arrivals in New York, by Adam Gopnik. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his new memoir, Gopnik recalls the decade after he and his soon-to-be wife moved from Montreal to New York, in 1980. Always the elegant stylist, he effortlessly weaves in the city's cultural history, tracing his path from graduate student in art history to staff writer for The New Yorker. HOME FIRE, by Kamila Shamsie. (Riverhead, $26.) In a challenging and engrossing novel full of tiny but resonant details, two families find their fates entwined when a young man travels to Syria to join ISIS, following in the steps of the jihadist father he never really knew. BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, by Attica Locke. (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $26.) This murder mystery follows Darren Matthews, a black Texas Ranger, as he tries to solve a dual killing in a small town full of zany characters, buried feelings and betrayals that go back generations. THE STONE SKY: The Broken Earth: Book Three, by N. K. Jemisin. (Orbit, paper, $16.99.) Jemisin, who writes the Book Review's Otherworldly column about science fiction and fantasy, won a Hugo Award for each of the first two novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. In the extraordinary conclusion, a mother and daughter do geologic battle for the fate of the earth. AUTUMN, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Ingvild Burkey. (Penguin Press, $27.) In this collection of finely honed miniature essays, the first of a planned quartet based on the seasons, the Norwegian author of the multi-volume novel "My Struggle" describes the world for his unborn child. AFTERGLOW (A Dog Memoir), by Eileen Myles. (Grove, $24.) Myles, the poet and autobiographical novelist, turns her attention to the role her dog Rosie played in her life and art. ONE NATION AFTER TRUMP: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, by E. J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. (St. Martin's, $25.99.) Seasoned Washington observers examine how Donald Trump's rise reflects long-term Republican trends. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
A memoir that stretches the limits of its genre by making a dog the textual centerpiece. Notorious poet Myles (I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, 2015, etc.) strikes again with an irreverently poetic memoir that traces her experience losing her pit bull Rosie. The book begins with a hand-addressed letter Myles received in 1999 that reads, "I take the libertyof forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling Rosie.' I am Rosie's lawyer." From there, the author spirals into an introspective look at what it means to be a dog and to be at the mercy of another human. Myles divides the book into a series of mostly brief episodessome true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tonethat reflect Rosie's thoughts as well as the author's experiences with her own thoughts, but it never becomes overly nostalgic or sad. "The past is so often a place whose colors are only in my mind," writes Myles. Certainly, readers may feel like much of the narrative's meat happens offstage, but that's part of the author's charm. "I like to make it heavier sometimes. Saying versions of the same thing," she writes, "I mean here. You probably already guessed it but I like saying it again. That one little piece again with a twist. And a thud. I don't feel this way about everything but there are moments that need to be heavy. As a fact. Not an idea." Rarely too heavy to be approachable, Myles' work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. A captivating look at a poet's repeated attempt "to dig a hole in eternity" through language. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Myles-poet, novelist, feminist presidential candidate, professor, librettist, nonfiction writer, inspiration for the lesbian poet character Leslie Mackinaw on the show Transparent, and Guggenheim fellow-has written a love letter to her beloved pit bull Rosie. Myles's phantasmagoric account of her 16 years with Rosie-and many years without her-includes not only a sorrowful retelling of decline and illness but also a recital of the facts of Rosie's first mating, in the nerve-wracking chapter "The Rape of Rosie," as well as various imaginings of Rosie's thoughts (not to mention her remarks as a talk show guest). Myles wanders through complicated family -relationships, a history of alcoholism, and her credo of writing on her way to delivering a singular portrait of Rosie. Readers in search of an anodyne for their grief will find it buried deep in the midst of her swirling prose. VERDICT Myles succeeds here in producing a rare new breed of dog memoir: think Patti Smith's Just Kids, not John Grogan's Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]-Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
You've just fallen down on the grass. I thought this would be a nice place to sit in the afternoon. The cat shows up, black, looking out. When I'm surrounded by trees, a condition I've sought out pretty persistently throughout my life, the thing I think I might like the most about them is this whisper like all the hair of the world passing through the tunnel of one single breath--if that is a form of percussion. This irregular hiss of trees and wind. I think it is my mother. And I am her son, and you are my dog. Our relationship is part discomfort & humiliation and part devotion. Oh once upon a time I wanted a dog exactly as much as I wanted to be alive. Maybe I didn't even want a dog then. I wanted to say that I was alive. Even to be a dog would be enough and how good if I could be seen wanting one and could begin asking for it incessantly--if I could summon up asking in every possible manner. Please. Leaving notes under pillows and toilet seat covers. Did I want a dog, really. No I was a kid who was desperate to be seen in a state of desire & supplication. That was many years ago. I wanted to already be my yes. A positive child in a state of knowing & reaching out. Not for myself but towards a friend. Excerpted from Afterglow by Eileen Myles, Eileen Myles All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| [The Letter] | p. 1 |
| Protect Me You | p. 4 |
| My Dog/My God | p. 11 |
| The Death of Rosie | p. 25 |
| The Puppets' Talk Show | p. 28 |
| Goodnight, Sweet Queen | p. 44 |
| The Rape of Rosie | p. 60 |
| Just Before and Just After | p. 66 |
| X (transcription) | p. 76 |
| My Father Came Again as a Dog | p. 81 |
| XX | p. 88 |
| Foam | p. 93 |
| XXX | p. 105 |
| The Navel | p. 108 |
| The Order of Drinking (3-D) | p. 112 |
| XXXX | p. 136 |
| Dog House | p. 141 |
| "The Dog's Journey" | p. 157 |
| To the Post Office | p. 176 |
| The Walk | p. 197 |