“Myles is unafraid of language, of experience, of self. Be prepared to encounter just about anything through the reading. “

I’m not overly fond of confessional poetry, but Myles has taught me something about it or its evolution as a form. I’ve always thought that most of the most renowned confessional poets (Sexton, Plath, Snodgrass, Wylie, etc.) built in a line of artificiality or distance in the crafting of their lives to fit the sense of verse; too often that border was where experience passed into overly-conscious meaning.

Eileen Myles, to my eye, has all but erased that boundary. There is an unabashed intimacy to her work, not merely in its language which is often coarse and physical yet for moments falls naturally into coalescence. Abandoning syntax, Myles situates her persona in single spaces and allows her thinking to spin out (the yearning for a lover, a politician’s speech, a cat descending the stairs, the smells of her body, the sky beyond her window). A casual reading may find little here but these autobiographical sketches–and indeed they exist, it seems, primarily for this–but we also witness the how of Myles’s thoughts, the assemblage of ideas, the marking of priority, the slippages into the surreal or fantasy, the reasons these banal realities echo the opposite.

More (while I grabbed this work as a first read of hers because I could not easily select another place to start), I Must Be Living Twice offers a near-chronology of her published works from the 1970s to near-present (2015). Witnessing a condensation of this “fiercely intellectual” thinking (as described by others)–emerging, waning, waxing, sighing–across time is its own revelation.

Myles is unafraid of language, of experience, of self. Be prepared to encounter just about anything through the reading. There is so little pretended in this self-disclosure, even when it strays into longed-for fictions.