Your President, Eileen Myles

‘I got to New York in the seventies, and I remember looking at Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen – these are working-class kids from New Jersey – and I thought, “I’ll be a working-class kid from Boston.”’

After more than 40 years in New York, Eileen Myles still reads with that broad Boston accent and remains fascinated by ideas of the constructed self. That self has been variously described as ‘queer feminist literary icon’, ‘underground punk poet’ and even, in Myles’s own ironic formulation, ‘your President’.

An undeniable, unclassifiable and prolific talent, Eileen Myles writes poetry, fiction (most famously, Chelsea Girls), non-fiction and art criticism. Myles was a protege of Allen Ginsberg and today is a hero to the likes of Maggie Nelson and Chris Kraus.

Myles’s latest book is Afterglow (a dog memoir). It’s a hilarious, fabulist and eloquent meditation on the life and death of the poet’s own pet dog, Rosie. ‘At the most literal level, poetry is my politics,’ Myles has said. Find out why and how with host Quinn Eades in May.

Hares & Hyenas will be our bookseller at this event.

This event will be Auslan interpreted.