Cool For You: A Novel

Description

Eileen Myles, the popular author of Chelsea Girls and Not Me, the poet who ran an openly female campaign for president in 1992, now gives us a talking masterpiece of a novel that scratches out and rewrites the picture of what fifty years of female life looks like today. Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. Cool For You's tough girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State.

Eileen Myles has published twenty books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction and libretti. She's a Guggenheim Fellow, has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a Lambda Award for lesbian fiction, and was named to the Whiting/Slate Second Novel List. She also received an arts writers grant from Creative Capital/ the Warhol Foundation and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. She lives in Marfa, Texas, and New York.

"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