Description

‘Ruthlessly unguarded, surgically self-parodic and infinitely funny … An indispensable book about friendship and intimacy; I alternately laughed and shivered as I turned the pages’ Guardian

From the prolific poet, activist and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Exploring permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder, these poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog during the pandemic lockdowns.

Their 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 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 Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.

Publisher Review

Ruthlessly unguarded, surgically self-parodic and infinitely funny … An indispensable book about friendship and intimacy; I alternately laughed and shivered as I turned the pages * Guardian * Myles’s poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary and timeless. — Maggie Nelson 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. — Lena Dunham I loved Evolution . . . Poems that lope along, chatty, restless and limber — Olivia Laing