a "Working Life"

by Eileen Myles

From “one of the essential voices in American poetry” (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present

The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.

a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.

With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 18, 2023

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

poems were either a 5/5 or a 2/5 no in between

[Alan]

The first Eileen Myles work that I’ve read. Maybe the wrong choice? I have been exploring a whole host of poetry over the past few weeks, mainly because of my busy schedule and relative inability to get into meaty books, like tougher poems or classic novels. Most of the poems here were bite-sized, one or two words a line. Unfortunately, they didn’t suit me. At all. I hope others will enjoy this collection by Myles when the book is out.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic for the ARC.

[Ren He · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, sparse, and precise. eileen myles writing about love, sex, aging, and nature is *chefs kiss*

"dont we need to see ourselves a lonely earth burning up with a party hat & drink in hand as if making a lot of noise was the plan ... "

[Hannah Showalter · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of reviews are saying that this wouldn't be a good introduction to myles' work, so i kind of regret reading this as my first. i do want to read others! i could tell that there was something in the writing here that i loved, just this particular collection wasn't for me!

[Jojo · Rating 2 out of 5]

“a lonely
earth
burning
up with
a party
hat & a drink
in his hand
as if
making
a lot of
noise
was a plan.”

Trotz vieler interessanter Themen und Ideen, konnte ich leider keine Verbindung zu diesem Gedichtband aufbauen. Ein großer Teil davon waren die Entscheidungen bzgl. Struktur und Formatierung der einzelnen Beiträge, die zwar offensichtlich sehr bewusst getroffen waren, mich aber davon abgehalten haben, mich wirklich mit den Inhalten zu beschäftigen.

[Inês · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5

I don’t like when I don’t understand words

[Syd · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for my eARC!
I was so looking forward to reading something by Eileen Myles. Unfortunately, I think this might have been the worst way to meet her work.
While I can appreciate the stylistic choices and formats, they really did not work for me. Almost every poem in this collection is formatted the same way (and I'll be honest, I didn't read most of them after the first 1/4 of the book). It's choppy, sentence fragments and even word fragments are given entire lines to themselves, making it feel really difficult to read. Maybe I'm not cool or smart enough for poetry like this, but it felt like a stretch. I was especially unsatisfied with poems like Memorial Day: "cat / jumps / into / a dump / ster / shopping"... and September: 'I heard / a distant / girl / screaming / out there / like an elastic / everyone / liked / the kitten / on the / boat / it's / an old / name / for a rub / ber / band / but a / band / all the same / which / is nothing / like / a tiger / that / killed / a kid / and later / the tiger / got shot / you kill / me. You / simply / kill me." And there are so many more just like these.
I could not get through this collection and believe me, I tried.

[Julie Grace Immink · Rating 3 out of 5]

A metronome

[lia 🐩 · Rating 3 out of 5]

le amo a eileen myles aunque si les soy honesta siento que es la rupi kaur de las chicas cool, en el libro hay tres poemas que siento que estarían re bien para leer en voz alta: “to love”, “the trip” y “put my house”, y bueno algunos versos sueltos que subrayé:

“what’s / the heart / but an / emptiness / in your / stomach / a hole / in your / head”

“and do i / love you / for you / distance / from it / or could / i love you / because / you are / close”

“perhaps this is the / start / of the latest / in my new / breed / of very / bad poems”

[Mallory Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this quick and thoughtful collection - there is something perpetually familiar about the way Myles writes and I find it comforting! The way sentences and even words were broken down into fragments made quite moments sharper and brought a disjointed stream of consciousness to the whole body of work.

[Kelly Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slips between focused and abstracted, images and epics

[Mic Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

They take you places you can only go with them, and I’m so grateful to go.

[Michael Mcmaster · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one. Last poem really pushed it up to 4 stars.

[SS · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it

and this/ is the relationship / I wanted
the dark / liquid / waking me up /in a /stolen /cup

[Olivia]

Poetry books are hard to rate because it’s like impossible for all the poems to be five stars so they have to be greater than the sum of their parts - so I’m going off that. Didn’t love every poem in here but they go together so well, & also there were some that I loved so so much

I just love the command that Eileen Myles has over language, the quirks in their abbreviations and punctuations, the movement & combining of their sentences as the poem keeps moving. There is a precise vagueness to their writing that I admire. Also a witty but sweet tone - it’s like you’re in on the joke but the joke is kind of scathing & they love you

The way they write about love was a toughy in a good way, so tender & casual, like that’s what it feels like to love & right now that’s hard for me to read about but I’m glad I got all of these poems in me

Ok I’m done but I’m still in my dyke poetry moment so onto the Adrienne rich next!!! Celebrate good times come on

[Sara Engdall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of thirsty dogs and people. Hot, dykey, gross-beautiful :) love the rhythm of the whole work like a talking metronome or walking bootsteps. Doesn’t have many metaphors or similes or fantastical elements because myles captures reality as both dizzying and boring and expansive enough, that they don’t need them.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ll ever be cool enough or smart enough to truly get what Myles is saying, but I enjoy playing witness and experiencing the the discomfort and humiliation of not really knowing?? Idk. Particular favourites were Friday Night, To Love, Casper, Erin, Beloved Park, and Mice

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liberated, authentic, unflinchingly honest, Eileen Myles’ poems are agile and exciting. I follow them awestruck toward their end as though following the unexpected scripture of my own consciousness. An absolutely brilliant poet, and “a ‘Working Life’” is an absolutely brilliant collection.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When I was
young
I liked the
emptiness
of my
home &
now like
it or not
here is
this sweet
accumulation.” — “March 3”

[Alba · Rating 4 out of 5]

la mente de las personas es una cosa tan rara.:) muchos poemas sobre perros y sobre barcos y también otras cosas

[maren]

i’ve read a lot of eileen myles that i love & a lot that is just absolutely not for me & this was mostly the latter. a couple gems tho!

[Sara Luzuriaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

not my favorite of their work but some good stuff in here. laughed aloud at:
"are you
writing
a book
or are
you just

in your
house"

ouch

[rae !! · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want my dog in ur dog

[Alex Prong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the one about the mice and the one about the real estate vampires

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first time reading Myles’ work. The most striking feature of the collection is the sparseness and length of the lines, which are only 1-3 words long in most of the poems. In fact, I had a hard time conceiving of them as lines and started thinking of lines stretching vertically on the pages. Unfortunately, I don’t think all the words hold up under such strict pressure of line break, and Myles has to compromise a few times with abbreviations of words or let a few lines slip with only prepositions. The subjects of the poems are materials of the everyday, and these can read well as coffee poems—bits of philosophies and simple observations. It’s hard to hold onto memories of specific poems because there are so many similarities between them in subject and form. You’ll find some of these were published in very impressive mags like Poetry and The New Yorker, but, honestly, these are the kinds of poems that, when I see them the in Poetry and the New Yorker, I say “Really?”

[Joe Olipo · Rating 3 out of 5]

“you become
in your
life her
recording
device” — Eileen Myles

Fully half of all poetry has been ruined by fucking. But the fact that "the vagina of my life is so stretched out" has nothing to do with this. (Given the eschatological possibility that Jesus/Anubis will be measuring our life against the weight of a feather, perhaps the pulled tissue is already in its most Redeemed form . . . ) That one has not yet gotten enough of it, or has just had too much, or is putting it into the poems, or is doing something stimulating instead of writing verse is what I'm thinking of. (Though considering the vast productions halted by these pre-occupations, one thinks most of these projects would not have been much good anyway.)

Myles, late in life, is still doing the "too burnt, too gay" for "musty brown pleasure" thing, remaining exceedingly good at it. Writing a kind of spoken verse punctuated with line breaks, impossible to memorize (this appears not to be the objective), frequent remarkable one-liners, and often humorous (greatest strength) in this forgettable collection. A detached style, concerned with ways-of-being punctuated with occasional funny observation-in-moment, is not compatible with explicit politics (ideology). We are less amused by Myles's advocacy with the neighborhood association against the construction of a high-rise over a beloved park than by anything else in the collection — seems forced as nothing else does.

Fully half of all poetry has been ruined by dog ownership. Out of 1000 poems being written around the world every minute, probably 999 are related to dogs. (So, by the numbers, maybe not all of them are bad). The fact that we are reminded, "honey’s safe and butter’s safe," doesn't mean these poems have all been ruined yet.

And she is doing a trick or two as well (another way in which Myles is not like an old dog). Soliciting the terms and parts of speech, such that at the end of a phrase we realize a tricky noun has been a verb all along

"I’ll never use you
in a poem
I’ll use everything
& it will cover
you & the
egg crinkles
& the toaster
moans
it was trying"

Superior Selections:
SECRET LANGUAGE (daughter poem and phone poem)
"in here you’re like a clown that
squeezing the long internal history of women
[. . .]
"she would sit there on the phone being Polish for hours"
[. . .]
"being mum
you have me now mother have a big manhattan mom but she wanted a son

MICE (funny dog poem)
"they see a cluster of small rubber ducks & scraps of broken shells & think I’ll shit there "
[. . .]
"they’re unclean anyone would say isn’t it why I must kill them
but I’m unclean too isn’t that why they’re here"

PUT MY HOUSE (love poem and dog poem)
(unquoteable)

Selected Phrases:
"Perhaps this is the start in the latest of my new breed of very bad poems."
"made that melon bright"
"black barns hold my contentment"
"and I was making a mountain of sleep"
“you were looking very good on instagram yesterday”
"there’s a lot of suffering here in this room."
“i’m thinking how funny the yeats line on his tombstone”
“there’s no way to see everything in a pink painting”
“low grounded thing they think”
“the nothing spot where a tree’s so long ago been”

“cat jumps
into a dumpster
shopping”

“but that isn’t how you feel. waiting world violent friend."

[Sura Shealey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved some of the imagery in this, and how abstract it was. However, the use of hyphens, white space, and misspellings or alternate spellings made this difficult for me to read at times. The poetry is unique and something that I would recommend to a lot of people I know who would love this, it just isn’t for me personally! Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher!

[karina · Rating 3 out of 5]

nice to be so lazy and read this in the sun. i got it because it was damaged and half-off at that ridgewood bookstore/cafe. i like: The Trip, March 3,WTF, Put My House, Archer, Beloved Park, and of course....:

The nothing
spot
where
a tree's
so long
ago been.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

eileen is a great written poet but hearing them read this work out loud made it transform into something magical

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
I don't think this is Myles' best stuff but I enjoyed reading it.