Snowflake / different streets

By Eileen Myles

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• In their first book of poetry since 2007, legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles creates poet and poem anew as they push the boundaries of their craft ever closer to the enigmatic core. Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy.
  
  Two books by Myles combined in tête-bêche formatting.
  
  Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry

• Eileen Myles [offers] the reader a humanely funny extended meditation on travel through space and time, and how such distances are mediated by technology and the mind.
  Kathleen Rooney, Boston Review
  
  ...Myles’ genius lies in making the grand gesture that includes the trivial detail and the sublime at once, their juxtaposition underscoring how we are small and made large by connection, paradoxically isolate and dependent.
  Brian Teare, Los Angeles Review of Books
  
  Myles confronts the pressing extenuations of identity, materiality, spatiality, and spirituality, and in so doing illuminates a melting quality to these confrontations that is at once spellbinding and sad.
  Thomas Page McBee, The Boston Phoenix
  
  Myles has always written queerly, her lens beautifully tilted, her work — whether art critique or a libretto or novels or, again and again, poems—lawless and conversational, precise and transcendent. In her new collection she illuminates the link between gender and physical space in one pass.
  Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
  
  At 63, Myles is still a countercultural dream machine, back with her first verse in five years. In her short-breathed lines, technology and tenderness torque time and space...
  Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
  
  From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.
  Gina Myers, The Rumpus
  
  This new double collection of poems from Wave Books in Seattle has everything readers of Myles adore in her work. All the wit, charm, honesty, sexiness, and surprises are here for another go-round.
  Patrick James Dunagan, New Pages
  
  The newest from the legendary Myles (Sorry, Tree) is two books in one, printed in opposite directions in the same book, one more public-facing while the other is more private. Conversational yet exact, Myles navigates contemporary landscape with seemingly effortless wit and tenderness.
  Publishers Weekly
       
  

• Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, was educated in catholic schools, graduated from U. Mass. (Boston) in 1971 and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. Myles quickly became part of the reading, publishing and performance scene in the East Village, editing dodgems in the late 70s and becoming part of the community of St. Mark’s Poetry Project where they studied and were friends with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Paul Violi and Bill Zavatsky. In 1979 they were assistant to poet James Schuyler. Myles was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project in 1984-86. Myles is a vivid interpreter of their own work and travels widely in the US and Canada and internationally giving readings and performances. They are the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including, Snowflake/different streets (Wave Books, 2012), Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007), Chelsea Girls, Not Me, Skies, The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, Cool for You, and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, and Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) published by OR books and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. They wrote the libretti for Hell, an opera with music composed by Michael Webster which was performed on both coasts, 2004-2006. They have received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Myles contributes to a wide number of publications including ArtForum, Bookforum, Parkett, and The Believer. They are a Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego where they taught for five years. They live in New York.