A review by kdawn999
A "Working Life" by Eileen Myles

2.0

This was my first time reading Myles’ work. The most striking feature of the collection is the sparseness and length of the lines, which are only 1-3 words long in most of the poems. In fact, I had a hard time conceiving of them as lines and started thinking of lines stretching vertically on the pages. Unfortunately, I don’t think all the words hold up under such strict pressure of line break, and Myles has to compromise a few times with abbreviations of words or let a few lines slip with only prepositions. The subjects of the poems are materials of the everyday, and these can read well as coffee poems—bits of philosophies and simple observations. It’s hard to hold onto memories of specific poems because there are so many similarities between them in subject and form. You’ll find some of these were published in very impressive mags like Poetry and The New Yorker, but, honestly, these are the kinds of poems that, when I see them the in Poetry and the New Yorker, I say “Really?”