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There is a transcript of a lecture on foam, snatches of poems, a script for a talk show featuring a dead dog and a wooden puppet called Oscar.īut mostly Afterglow is about Rosie, the black and white pit bull bitch who was Myles’s long-serving companion. Myles is a past master of the digression, a distractible dog, taking tangents that extend across galaxies (my favourite concerns George Bush’s true identity as an alien snake queen, impregnated in the White House). The voice is chatty and demotic, perpetually ventriloquising, avid to sample different tones.

“My shirts are tighter,” Myles observed.Īfterglow is Myles’s dog book, 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 into – well, love, life, death, the bardo states in between, plaid, pathetic art, Manichaeism, lost parents, animal vision, alcoholism, Ireland, gender, ecstasy and grief. That same winter, the television series Transparent featured a lesbian poet modelled on the author. Myles’s 1994 non-fiction novel Chelsea Girls was republished in 2015 to ecstatic reviews and round-the-block queues at readings. Like I Love Dick, by Myles’s friend Chris Kraus, these loping experiments in autofiction have hit new audiences in the last few years.

Born in 1949, a third-generation participant in the New York School of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, they (“they” is Myles’s preferred pronoun) have written more than 20 books, which rollick between novel, memoir, poetry and art criticism. E ileen Myles is a New York poet, maybe the New York poet, a swaggering troubadour of casually roving brilliance.