Praise for Afterglow (a dog memoir) “Unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. [Myles’s] grief at losing Rosie is profound; it is also a revelation . . . Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display . . . because [Afterglow ] is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it . . . the writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.” —Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review “Afterglow is a mutt elegy in a million . . . Myles gets at something no other dog book I’ve read has gotten at quite this distinctly: The sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human . . . It’s raw and affecting, and in its wild snuffling way, utterly original.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air , NPR “You’ll laugh, and you’ll cry, yes, but you’ll also think hard, as you work to pull together the many disparate, cosmic, and charming notions Myles sets forth . . . with quicksilver intellect and whimsy fully engaged . . . [Afterglow is] wry, far-flung, and wonderfully loving.” —Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe “Afterglow portrays a complex and often hilarious relationship between two animals, characterized by love and deep interrogation of power, creativity, and point of view . . . for Myles, a dog becomes the surrogate for a sort of vicarious enlightenment . . . an ever-deepening investigation into the nature of human-being-ness, self-knowledge, and knowing things outside of yourself . . . A book that’s wise to miscommunication but hungry to overcome it, Afterglow celebrates that rare authorial ability to get out of one’s own way and show us a singular and limber mind roaming free.” —Melissa Broder, Bookforum “Fantastical . . . wrenching . . . obsession becomes a way to process grief.” —Helena Fitzgerald, Rolling Stone “To read Eileen Myles is to feel as if the poet, after spotting you across the room at a crowded party, has guided you by the elbow to a private corner to confide their personal theories of the universe. Afterglow is just that intimate. Part elegy, part meditation, part performance art . . . poignant, sweeping.” —Claire Luchette, O, the Oprah Magazine “Tender, lyrical.” —Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed , one of 28 Exciting New Books You Need To Read “Myles’s storytelling is as unconventional and allusive as ever, ranging from an imaginary talk show featuring Rosie as a guest to the more quotidian joys of loving an animal.” —Estelle Tang, Elle , one of the Best Books to Read This Fall “The universal theme of attachment shines through in Eileen Myles’s unconventional Afterglow . . . With great candor, Myles uses the emotional intimacy of a human’s relationship with a dog to discuss larger questions of emotional intimacy . . . Afterglow illustrates the lasting bond between humans and dogs in a new way.” —Tobias Carroll, Portland Press Herald “[Afterglow aims] to catalog life in gritty, naturalistic stills that, when amassed over time, form a lyrical whole, like a good grunge song . . . Myles works to bridge the power discrepancies between owner and dog, author and subject.” —Maddie Crum, Los Angeles Review of Books “Wild and unruly . . . lively, conversational, and highly intelligent . . . [a] sincere elegiac reflection on a life shared with another being. Afterglow is a book about dogs, as well as the lessons of caretaking and intuition that they teach us, but it’s also a book about listening and observing, about how we communicate and how we relate.” —Caroline Tompkin, Vice “[Afterglow ] incomparably materializes the imagination one uses when relating to a pet.” —Rachel Davies, Nylon “Extraordinary . . . moving without being maudlin . . . Afterglow brings language to the nonverbal intimacy of a human life lived with a dog.” —Nathan Goldman, Literary Hub “Offbeat . . . whimsical but philosophical.” —Tom Beer, Newsday “[A] mixture of celebration and elegy . . . Eileen makes words bite and lick at weirdly sensitive regions never previously detected.” —Charlie Fox, Spike “Afterglow stretches the boundaries of memoir, blending fact and fable. Raucous and elegiac, hilarious and heartbreaking, the book explores not only Myles’ relationship with Rosie, but family and trauma; politics (including Myles’ 1991-2 presidential campaign); memory; and poetry.” —Alyssa Greene, Lambda Literary “Myles’s 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.” —Kirkus Review (starred review) “A rare new breed of dog memoir; think Patti Smith’s Just Kids , not Josh Grogan’s Marley and Me , absinthe not saccharine.” —Library Journal (starred review) “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.” —Booklist (starred review) “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 . . . Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight.” —Publishers Weekly “A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is, Afterglow is a truly astonishing creation.” ―Helen Macdonald, author of the New York Times bestseller H Is for Hawk “What is a dog if not god? In Afterglow , Eileen Myles steps up to the challenge for writers to function as prophets. Ghostwritten in part by deceased pit bull Rosie, this ‘dog memoir’ explores―among other things―geometry, gender, mortality, evil, aging, and plaids. Myles makes new rules for what prose writing can be. Afterglow is Myles’s funniest, profoundest work yet.” ―Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker “Part eulogy, part homage, part love-letter, part madcap scrapbook . . . Love and loss are replayed and reimagined through the paranormal and surreal just as against the everyday and the earthly; the familial, communal, spiritual, sexual and bestial are all enlisted to spin the story of one special canine and her human. Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; Afterglow is the sort of multidimensional love story you could only expect from one of our greatest experimental writers living today!” —Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sick: A Life of Lyme, Love, Illness, and Addiction “Following Eileen Myles around a dog is like following Leopold Bloom around Dublin. Reading Afterglow is like entering the company of a sensibility that is rich, original, witty, and tonally brilliant. It is the darting asides, the phrasing and the subplots that matter most in this book, that give pure, sheer constant pleasure.” —Colm Tóibín, author of House of Names “Everything Eileen Myles touches turns to poetry. Whether called a dog or a cat, it’s always poetry. Emily Dickinson famously decided that poetry was anything that made her ‘feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.’ I can imagine Emily Dickinson writing an ecstatic blurb for Myles’s tender, trippy, deep, yet humanely silly new gift to the world: Afterglow . In this age of fake news and even fake poetry, trust this voice!” ―Brad Gooch, author of Smash Cut and Rumi’s Secret “What astounds me about Afterglow is the way in which Myles’s mourning of the dog Rosie’s death leads to surprising landscapes of thought in the language, where between sentences you’re walking out into vast open-air arenas and every time you do this some new light goes on in your brain. You think you’re reading about Eileen and a dog. You are reading about them, but with the complexities of their closeness always pointing farther up the field, asking why we’re here, what we’re going to do and with whom are we going to do it.” —Renee Gladman, author of Calamities “Wildly inventive and just plain wild, feral, even, Eileen Myles’s dazzling Afterglow is about a dog, and her owner, and everything else in life, and also death, too.” ―Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up
…Eileen Myles's winning new memoir…is unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. Her grief at losing Rosie is profound; it is also a revelation…Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display. As a prose writer she is naturally, even obsessively, digressive, and the book's loose, nonlinear form allows her to riff or ruminate on what can seem at times like a maniacal range of subjects…Given how deeply concerned it is with loss, Afterglow is inescapably a sad book, but, because it is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it…The writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.
The New York Times Book Review - Sigrid Nunez
06/19/2017 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.)
★ 06/15/2017 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
★ 2017-05-21 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 liberty…of 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 episodes—some true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tone—that 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.