Mini Book Review: a “Working Life” by Eileen Myles

I’m something
unreliable
and this
is a day for
poetry.

I’m trying to understand why I liked this book so much and I don’t know. Given that I don’t have an answer, I don’t entirely know how to recommend this book and how to write a review for it! I’ll sum it up by saying that there are just some really wonderful moments that pull you in and honestly Eileen Myles is so much fun to read out loud!

Makes Me GIFfrom Makes GIFs

My personal favourites from this collection are April 15, Beloved Train, Love Song and September 7.

You can listen to Love Song on Apple Podcasts, but honestly I had more fun reading it!

a “Working Life” comes out on the 18th of April and is published by Grove Press!

Blurb for a “Working Life”

rom “one of the essential voices in American poetry” (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present

The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.

a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s 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 also 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 Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.