Description: "Why can't I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work. The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be 'inside'"--Back cover.
Brief description: Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate, two books of cultural criticism, and, most recently, a critical biography of Kathy Acker. She is a co-editor of Semiotexte and lives in Los Angeles.
Review Quotes: "The reissue, after 17 years, creates a strange sort of time vortex, a double-lens of perspective, in which Myles is looking back on the self that wrote the book, who is in turn looking back on the self in the story." --Helena Fitzgerald, Rolling Stone
"Her work is hard to describe, best encountered on its own terms; suffice to say it combines frankness and beauty in a truly original way." --The Guardian "Myles has long been a steady presence on the New York poetry scene...With the publication of this new and selected volume, which covers her 40-year career, she has become the toast of the town and the poetry world at-large." --Publishers Weekly "Myles is a big deal, a rock star, sort of like the Patti Smith of contemporary poetry. . . . Myles is relentlessly casual, and even joyful. She has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, she's happy to show us the way." --NPR