Readings

Cool for You

Soft Skull Press, 270 pp., $14 (paper)

Eileen Myles came into my mouth last night. Her words, tinged with a distinct flavor of Northeast, not the Northeast of Smith or Vassar, mind you, but the Northeast of the Boston working class, filled my mouth as I read. I chewed on them good. They tasted real. I think she had chewed on them first, because by the time they got to me, the meanings were whole and everything felt real. Which isn’t to say that some of those verbal chicken nuggets didn’t, at times, come in the form of the obtuse or strange or staccato or from left field. Some indeed did. Her rhythm, her pacing took over, though, and somehow, even the words that didn’t make sense felt perfectly right. She has that knack, I found, as I stopped to savor, then gulp down. More words. More words. Her prose is at once urgent, frenetic, discombobulated, succinct, while at the same time metered, considered, mulled over, and fully digestible.

Cool for You might very well be about the 50 or so years of Myles’ lesbian-feminist working-class poet’s life, it might very well be about someone else’s life, or it might very well be total fiction. Whatever the case, Myles makes it all come alive and livable and entirely relatable-to. Hers is the voice of the woman who doesn’t fit in, who, as a child in Catholic school, was robbed of the class election because the nun in charge thought it too absurd (even though she won the election by a clear margin, not like that stupid one in November …), who, as a kid, could draw and was musical, and who, as an emergent young woman, wanted so much to be an astronaut. The places she takes us with these chewy words — Arlington, the Westborough State Hospital, the toilet called the basement (not exactly the Vatican, MOMA, Carnegie Hall, or Cape Canaveral) — might at first seem bleak, grim and grimy, nasty and foul. But they aren’t. Myles brings out the human in them and in the mundaneness of the daily grind. She’s no apologist, no sad, woe-is-me revisionist, obsessed with her past (whether this is specifically her past or not) as a form of therapy for all to see; she’s a woman at peace with the funny little twists that this life offers — that or just incredibly strong and fuck-all about whatever shit she’s had to deal with. I wonder, as I go back over some of the book’s tastiest passages, if the little girl, who at the age of 12 wanted so much to be an astronaut, understands that now in her full, fiery fierceness, she’s sending readers to the moon.

This article appears in February 2 • 2001.