Eileen Myles deserves her reputation as a startling frank and forthright poet, but I found her effort here to be too haphazard to rate more than two stars. While some parts of the book offer honest and heartfelt insight into the human and animal bond, one has to wade through far too much pretentious stream of consciousness crap to fully relax into the author's voice with any regularity.Myles is most effective when she is writing directly about her beloved pit bull, Rosie, or when she is channeli...

what a book. magic. never read anything like it. some sections I need to go back and spend more time with, were harder to understand. the structure and theme of story as tapestry really worked for me. well worth a second read.

A gorgeous, inventive, poetic fever dream of a dog memoir. I truly needed it.

It went on, and on, and on some more, and it still hadn't ended, and then there was another few chapters - 200 pages that seemed like 2000. The only analog that comes to mind is the film Melancholia.

As bizarre, crass, and hilarious as any other Eileen Myles book. I laughed a lot, I mostly had no idea what was going on, but I liked it. I will never get tired of the creative ways this woman talks about genitals.

I initially thought this might be cheesy bc ~~dog book~~ but it’s sm more than that and I loved it. “Okay you can open your eyes. The pitbull is watching the skyline. She’s whispering inside my head. She’s singing to me. ‘One tree, that’s all you need.’ Shaped like broccoli or cauliflower some rainy day. I’m glad I woke. Maybe I’ll make some coffee. She keeps whispering. ‘One tree.’ That’s all you need. Start a whole civilization that way. ‘One little piece grows it all.’ Feel the bump. And her

I'm only half way through this memoir, but...wow! Imagine a poet writing about a dog, a beloved dog that has to be put down. Imagine the dog's perspective in all this. Innovative structure, beautiful writing; all in all a stunning work of genius. What. a. fantastic. book.Update, now that I've finished. There are riffs of gorgeous prose, a poet's ear for what is real/true. There are also places where Myles lost me completely. Her discussion of writing as foam, for instance. I was hanging in there...

I wish this had been published without the subtitle, or with a more cagey one (like “Notes towards a Dog Memoir” or “A Sort of Dog Memoir”). If what you want is a straightforward dog memoir, read Dog Years by Mark Doty and Ordinary Dogs by Eileen Battersby, both excellent examples of the genre. The time that Myles, known primarily as a poet and queer theorist, had with her pit bull Rosie between 1990 and 2006 is less the substance of this book than a jumping-off point for a jumbled set of remini...

Although it gets a bit long in the tooth, I loved this. As a life-long dog person, about to get his own dog for the first time, it also hit me right in the sweetest of spots. Rosie seems like she was a good dog, perhaps one of the best, to inspire a work so multifaceted and silly and loving and heartfelt and weighty as this. And that Eileen Myles, she's not half-bad either.

I went into this with a very open mind. Having finished it, I'm left with very mixed feelings. The author certainly has a wonderful way with words and her affinity for poetry is obvious throughout. I just had some trouble at times keeping up with where she was going and who she was speaking as. Perhaps it's because I'm not familiar with her writing style, but I kept finding myself lost and having to backtrack a bit to figure out what she was talking about. I received an ARC from NetGalley, Grove...

This book was one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. It started off as a 5 star book for me until about halfway through, when it completely devolved into incomprehensible passages that felt vaguely theoretical but just didn’t give me enough to hang onto, which was a bummer bc I would have been here for that kind of genre mix and the ideas being explored. Def worth a read if your dog dies, rlly raw and evocative yet brings up interesting points. Maybe just read the first half? Lol idk

Eileen Myles writes about her dog? Obviously I had to read this one right away. This is a book of dogs and grief. It is a book of loss, and kinship and what happens if dogs wrote us poetry and letters. There were stories that made me (as an admittedly neurotic dog person ) uncomfortable, and stories about the end, about aging, failing bodies, and passing, that made my heart clench (while I anxiously pet my ancient canine sidekick). "Each writer is required to tell a dog's story and so dogs attac...

4.5! Loved much of this, a lot. The essay on Foam as a concept/metaphor for thinking about knowledge/writing is my favorite, I think, but many of the doggo pieces are glorious and sui generis. Many adopt a style that is a kind of frothy walk / flaneur avec dog; and then there's Rosie (the dog) speaking from the dead, "ghostwriting". Myles is sometimes Jethro here, sometimes she, sometimes he, and Rosie, always, is god. Sometimes the pov rolls back and forth between Eileen and Rosie, and the effe...

Fucking wild. Dog is god is dad.

You see, it was this. The prose - was unreadable. I could have done with a poem like. Like, this. But not a full novela. It is. Exhausting.

Afterglow (a dog memoir) written by celebrity poet Eileen Myles is a heartfelt loving tribute to Rosie, her Pitbull Terrier that lived for nearly 17 years. Whether readers are familiar with Myles writing style or poetry, Myles captures a sensitive unique flair and a meaningful creative writing combination she is recognized for.Caring for an elderly incontinent dog—the endless cycle of washing and laundering is nearly impossible to keep up with. Myles resisted the notion to put Rosie down, though...

This book is for an audience that doesn’t include me. My bad. I thought it was a dog memoir and it’s really prose/poem/rumination.

I'm conflicted about this book. Parts of it just seem heartless... I've lost beloved pets through the years and my heart still aches when I really think about them. The grief just doesn't seem to be in this book for me. I don't mean to say the author didn't grieve her pet, I am sure she did (I cried for weeks after the loss of each of my pet children). I will finish the book, but just not right now.

Some of this I found quite touching, but parts of it were too scattered and out there for me. No criticism meant at all, just not my thing. I loved hearing about Rosie, though.

I think a lot of the time poets' prose efforts can be so packed that they're by nature uneven—I guess you can say the same for poetry as well. That's definitely the case with this book, and honestly I get the feeling that Myles would be just fine with the idea of taking what you want and leaving the rest. Some of it is just gorgeous, lyrical, madly associative and evocative. And some of it is just too dense or esoteric for the likes of me, and I was perfectly happy to read along and let some of