Cool for You.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Brief Article

Eileen Myles is a poet and she knows it, and now you can, too. What she has written in Cool for You (Soft Skull, 2000) is prose--a straight-ahead story about a working class Irish American girl in horrible schools and creepy jobs, who wants to busta move out of her home and history. The first-person point of view, which usually makes me want to shoot myself, is so vivid, dissociated, self-aware, and flat-out poetic in its description of day-to-day survival and transcendence that it verges on claustrophobic in its realization of setting...