Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems

Maxfield Parrish: Early and New Poems brings together selected work by Eileen Myles from 1978 through 1995. The collection opens with her poems from 1995, which are visceral, erotic, and self-proclaiming, as Myles's robust voice deeply anchors itself in relationships with her own body, other women, and the natural world. The arrangement of poems in this volume allows the reader to follow Myles's vigorous appetite for beauty amidst "all the daily pain/ & miserable faces & awful air," as she proudly portrays the women in her life in mundane and transcendent settings. Reviling a status quo that can't encompass her life's experiences, she bravely writes what her desire, her anxiety, and her disappointments feel like, recalling what she wrote in a 1978 poem, "Homebody": "Nothing's/ As fetching as the raw."