6/12/2023 0 Comments Afterglow eileen myles![]() This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved. Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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 story of Eileen Myles’ time with a pit bull named Rosie is captured in the decidedly unsentimental Afterglow. Poet and novelist Myles ( Inferno) reflects on 16 years with their pit bull Rosie. ![]()
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