An evening with Eileen Myles

Please note the lift at our venue (City Art Centre) is broken, access is only by stairs & escalators up, and steps down.

We couldn't be more thrilled to get to host Eileen Myles for a special event right here in Edinburgh in October!

They will be discussing their collection a "Working Life" (which is out now in paperback!)

From “one of the essential voices in American poetry,” (The New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerily morose poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present. It is the first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in a relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.

a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.

With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.

Eileen Myles in their own words, on a “Working Life”

“What is the poetry equivalent of sitting on a chair like a musician with just a guitar, or a comedian on a stool on the cover of an album not even standup, but just going to tell it to you right here on vinyl. For me, a “Working Life” is not so much unplugged as openly admitting that the poems here, the love poems and the waiting poems and the reveling in stark slowed down time is the essence of poetry as much as it was in my 20s as it is in in my 70s, like a grand contractual permission to be and the poems are the plan. a “Working Life” is a book in which throw my cards down, meaning the poems pretty much model the existence that is unfolding in all of them and these little formulas, short and long in which the plan gets revealed again and again was always to live exactly like this, and just once, now. I’m hoping the reader picks it up and feels it’s true.”

Our host for this event: Éadaoín Lynch is an Irish writer, editor & researcher based in Edinburgh. With Alycia Pirmohamed, they co-edited Re·creation: A Queer Poetry Anthology in 2022 - the same year, their debut poetry pamphlet Fierce Scrow launched with Nine Pens Press. Their poetry has appeared in Gutter and The North Magazine among others, and their poem 'Brogue' was Commended for the Magma Poetry Competition by Raymond Antrobus in 2024.