Afterglow

June 19, 2017
Poet and novelist Myles (Inferno) reflects on 16 years with their pit bull Rosie. Inspired by Rosie’s death, Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy. The feeling of watching a beloved pet’s decline is rendered bittersweet: “Our present had a pastness to it every day.” There is humor, as the author recalls a fruitless attempt to breed Rosie (“I wondered if I was doing something illegal. Letting dogs have sex in my building”). There’s a chapter written as the transcript of a surrealist puppet show, wherein Rosie informs the audience that she has been writing Myles’s material since 1990. Myles also brings Hitler’s art, 14th-century tapestries, and Abu Ghraib into the narrative, and writes in the voice of Bo Jean Harmonica, an alter ego of sorts whose gender is categorized pithily: “I’m a man but there’s a woman in it.” Though there are occasional meandering thematic digressions, these seem a part of the journey. Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight.

Starred review from June 15, 2017

Myles--poet, novelist, feminist presidential candidate, professor, librettist, nonfiction writer, inspiration for the lesbian poet character Leslie Mackinaw on the show Transparent, and Guggenheim fellow--has written a love letter to her beloved pit bull Rosie. Myles's phantasmagoric account of her 16 years with Rosie--and many years without her--includes not only a sorrowful retelling of decline and illness but also a recital of the facts of Rosie's first mating, in the nerve-wracking chapter "The Rape of Rosie," as well as various imaginings of Rosie's thoughts (not to mention her remarks as a talk show guest). Myles wanders through complicated family relationships, a history of alcoholism, and her credo of writing on her way to delivering a singular portrait of Rosie. Readers in search of an anodyne for their grief will find it buried deep in the midst of her swirling prose. VERDICT Myles succeeds here in producing a rare new breed of dog memoir: think Patti Smith's Just Kids, not John Grogan's Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]--Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2017

Myles--poet, novelist, feminist presidential candidate, professor, librettist, nonfiction writer, inspiration for the lesbian poet character Leslie Mackinaw on the show Transparent, and Guggenheim fellow--has written a love letter to her beloved pit bull Rosie. Myles's phantasmagoric account of her 16 years with Rosie--and many years without her--includes not only a sorrowful retelling of decline and illness but also a recital of the facts of Rosie's first mating, in the nerve-wracking chapter "The Rape of Rosie," as well as various imaginings of Rosie's thoughts (not to mention her remarks as a talk show guest). Myles wanders through complicated family relationships, a history of alcoholism, and her credo of writing on her way to delivering a singular portrait of Rosie. Readers in search of an anodyne for their grief will find it buried deep in the midst of her swirling prose. VERDICT Myles succeeds here in producing a rare new breed of dog memoir: think Patti Smith's Just Kids, not John Grogan's Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]--Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2017
A memoir that stretches the limits of its genre by making a dog the textual centerpiece. Notorious poet Myles (I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, 2015, etc.) strikes again with an irreverently poetic memoir that traces her experience losing her pit bull Rosie. The book begins with a hand-addressed letter Myles received in 1999 that reads, "I take the liberty...of forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling 'Rosie.' I am Rosie's lawyer." From there, the author spirals into an introspective look at what it means to be a dog and to be at the mercy of another human. Myles divides the book into a series of mostly brief episodes--some true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tone--that reflect Rosie's thoughts as well as the author's experiences with her own thoughts, but it never becomes overly nostalgic or sad. "The past is so often a place whose colors are only in my mind," writes Myles. Certainly, readers may feel like much of the narrative's meat happens offstage, but that's part of the author's charm. "I like to make it heavier sometimes. Saying versions of the same thing," she writes, "I mean here. You probably already guessed it but I like saying it again. That one little piece again with a twist. And a thud. I don't feel this way about everything but there are moments that need to be heavy. As a fact. Not an idea." Rarely too heavy to be approachable, Myles' work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. A captivating look at a poet's repeated attempt "to dig a hole in eternity" through language.

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Starred review from August 1, 2017
For more than 16 years, Myles was companioned by a pit bull named Rosie until Rosie did what dogs do and left the author to navigate a post-Rosie world, solo. In the after of Rosie, poet Myles, the author of more than 20 books, including the novels Chelsea Girls (1994) and Cool for You (2000), writes this unconventional, uncontainable, phantasmagoric memoir of dog and owner. To let Rosie herself tell it, Afterglow is totally a book with legs (four if I can be dumb) so it will go a lot further than your earlier Eileen-based fictions. Here are small moments and large ones, like actual transcriptions of memories; here's Rosie as author, Rosie interviewed on a puppet talk show, Rosie as god, Rosie as Myles' father. Myles catalogs Rosie-related objects and chronicles the seeking of an ancestral home in Ireland and reading science fiction in San Diego during Rosie's last summer. Poetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)