A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that's really about life and everything there is, Eileen Myles's <i>Afterglow</i> is a truly astonishing creation.
- Helen Macdonald, author of H IS FOR HAWK,
Reading <i>Afterglow</i> 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,
Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; <i>Afterglow</i> 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,
Myles is often referred to as an 'institution' - the way one speaks of a terrific restaurant that's endured the waves of gentrification as a 'New York institution.' But the word bounces off her: there is nothing official about her, nothing staid or still.
- Ben Lerner, Paris Review
Eileen Myles is a New York poet, maybe <i>the</i> New York poet, a swaggering troubadour of casually roving brilliance...a work of surpassing strangeness that takes the form of an elegy for a lost pet and converts it into a weird and agitated philosophical inquiry.
- Olivia Laing, Guardian
Part of Myles's enduring appeal is that she's experimental in the true sense of the word; every time you turn around, she's up to something different . . . People have started using the word <i>legend</i> when talking about her life and work.
New York Magazine
What is a dog if not god? In <i>Afterglow</i>, 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, ageing, and plaids. Myles makes new rules for what prose writing can be. <i>Afterglow</i> is Myles's funniest, profoundest work yet.
- Chris Kraus, author of I LOVE DICK,
Myles forces a cultural and a literary reckoning with her life on her own terms, demanding understanding, the text held to the reader's throat.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Wildly inventive and just plain wild, feral, even, Eileen Myles's dazzling <i>Afterglow</i> is about a dog, and her owner, and everything else in life, and also death, too.
- Jami Attenberg, author of ALL GROWN UP,
<i>Chelsea Girls </i>offers poetry, sex, Catholicism, drugs, class and sexuality. This new reprint... is the missing data for anyone who has read only the male American beat writers.
- Deborah Levy, New Statesman
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: <i>Afterglow</i>. In this age of fake news and even fake poetry, trust this voice!
- Brad Gooch, author of SMASH CUT,
...offers a wide and empathetic embrace. [...] It is, unexpectedly, a book for the times.
Frieze