Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles
travels the city--wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit--seeing it with a
poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The
Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her--and our--lives in these contemporary crowds.
Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national
identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Bjork, queer
Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as
filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.
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Late in the Empire of Men
$558 -
Yeah
$1,400 -
The Rain in Portugal: Poems
$560 -
The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems
$698 -
Songs With Our Eyes Closed
$595 -
Taught by Women
$698 -
The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970
$700 -
Whereas: Poems
$560 -
The Essential W.S. Merwin
$630 -
The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi
$490 -
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems
$558 -
Flowers of Anti-Martyrdom
$770 -
Sacrum
$558 -
Más rojo bajo el sol
$768 -
Scale
$558 -
Things Seen and Unseen
$630 -
The Lazarus Poems
$873 -
Opening to the Poem
$525 -
Partially Excited States
$523 -
Fish Singing Foxes
$945