Cool for You: A Novel

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"

"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

"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

“A cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde.”—The New York Times 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.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus.