Evolution

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 is the author of more than twenty books, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, and most recently, Afterglow: a dog memoir. Their many honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and their poems were featured in seasons two and three of the Emmy-winning show Transparent. They live in Marfa, Texas, and New York City.



I loved Evolution by Eileen Myles: poems that lope along, chatty, restless and limber.



Eileen Myles's essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn't care he has a scar down his face, the thing you just wish you'd said.



Myles's poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless.



Myles is often referred to as an 'institution' - the way one speaks of a terrific restaurant that's endured the waves of gentrification as a 'New York institution.' But the word bounces off her: there is nothing official about her, nothing staid or still.



Part of Myles's enduring appeal is that she's experimental in the true sense of the word; every time you turn around, she's up to something different . . . People have started using the word legend when talking about her life and work.



Myles forces a cultural and a literary reckoning with her life on her own terms, demanding understanding, the text held to the reader's throat.