[b:Afterglow|34273725|Afterglow (a Dog Memoir)|Eileen Myles|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1494440821s/34273725.jpg|55332660] by [a:Eileen Myles|29605|Eileen Myles|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1203806884p2/29605.jpg] s a pastiche (lovely word), a paean to her pit bull, Rosie, and touches on children, parents, Ireland, alcoholism, goddesses, rape, Chora in Istanbul, San Diego, teaching, Kurt Cobain, old surfers, gender, sex, tapestries, history and a lot about foam. Not linear, not a story but bits and pieces that keep me reading in a slapdash way, picking it up from time to time, reading it backwards. The jacket cover says spirituality, celebrity and politics as well.

“Small bit of advice to the reader. No one ever wants to hear from anyone at any time anywhere that they have just purchased your book at the library sale. It’s like saying hey I plucked your book out from under a forklift just before it was heading to the dump. To write a book is to dig a hole in eternity....I feel an awe for the incredible permanence of the act of writing. Do you think I had any idea what I was about to write today when I sat down. No I thought I just better do it. And here I am already past the middle of my life. Sitting here humming along on the only road I know. Everything’s out there shifting. So maybe the writer should sit still. In her orange sand chair while the dog is dying. This might be when she would do her writing.…"

Per Rosie (the dog): "But as you pointed out to that Irish writer, Dave, when he brilliantly proposed he write a chick lit book --uh, Dave all men's books are chick lit. Every woman in literature is some guy's notion of how women think. Men invented the genre (calling it literature) yet when women write books they get cordoned off as chick lit. Where is dick lit I ask?" ( )

Wow! This book is stunning - ostensibly a tribute to her dog and their relationship, it manages to be that and a meditation on life, living in the present, death, poetry and the existential condition [among other things]. Multi-layered and using multiple literary techniques, this poetic exploration is both luminous and profane. At turns somber and laugh-out-loud hilarious, parts of the book can tend to seem rather inscrutable, but not in a particularly difficult way. Though the reader can still glean something from these formidable parts - the meaning may allude them. "...the proper refuge will have occurred and everyone will be beginning to live slowly in the right time with themselves. Because there is no kingdom now and the end is only when the road has invited us to leave." ( )

I think a lot of the time poets' prose efforts can be so packed that they're by nature uneven—I guess you can say the same for poetry as well. That's definitely the case with this book, and honestly I get the feeling that Eileen Myles would be just fine with the idea of taking what you want and leaving the rest. Some of it is just gorgeous, lyrical, madly associative and evocative. And some of it is just too dense or esoteric for the likes of me, and I was perfectly happy to read along and let some of it settle to the bottom in order for the stuff that resonated for me to rise. Although Myles definitely stretches the definition of "a dog memoir," there is some marvelous writing on dogs, and about dog ownership in particular—both the intense scrutiny that's borne out of love and also the dilemma of all that tenderness and adoration weighed against the wrongness of leading another living being around by the neck. I love Myles's directness, often bordering on crudeness, and the love that shines through it all for her Rosie—"the physiognomy of dearness unsurpassed." This one takes a little suspension of the need to get every sentence, but the rewards are great. ( )