Evolution: New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018

By Eileen Myles

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019

New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018

This new book of poems and essays by Eileen Myles finds our game-changing writer keying lines in the euphoric style that the New York Times has called 'one of the essential voices in American poetry.'

Following the critically claimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) and I Must Be Living Twice, their career-spanning selected poems, Evolution is Myles' first all-new poetry collection since 2011's Snowflake/different streets. These new poems upend genre in a vernacular that enacts, like nothing else, the way we speak (inside and out today). From walking around Marfa and New York City with an orange pit bull to Eileen's transcendent acceptance speech as President, Evolution lifts a can of Diet Coke as an End-of-the-World toast to embodiment, irreverence and risk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Oct 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781611859324

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in fall 2022. a “Working Life,” their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Reviews for Evolution

[over.the.edge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Evolution by Eileen Myles 2018 Grove Press 5 / 5I am absolutely blown away by this collection of poems, essays and speeches. Poems about belonging, desire, self-consciousness, politics, The Shakers (I´ve been fascinated by the shakers for years, read all i can find) and the process of being human-capable and culpable-how we evolve as individuals.Myles is absorbing and expressive and one of the best gay poets I´ve read. I find her fascinating with an intelligence and depth that is honest and refreshing to read.I highly recommend this book by one of New Yorkś most essential writers.p. 7-8:¨....Anyone here could probably tell me how many countries have legally elected socialist presidents, and moderate presidents and communist presidents and much revered and inspiring presidents and our government in response utterly disregarding their electoral process funded a right-wing autocrat, a human-rights violator who would make a deal. I don´t know if we are the most corrupt nation on earth. Does it need to start there? It´s just that having taken the land from one people and then dragged another people from their continent to work on it for free and then deciding that you want California and Texas and Montana and Idaho and New Mexico and Arizona so you take that from another people I mean when I think that Los Angeles was a Mexican City in 1848. We just thought we would take it. And our soldiers went into veracruz raping people. Just cause they could. And now were going to build a wall......¨Essential.