Myles gets at something no other dog book I’ve read has gotten at quite this distinctly: The sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human. the writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.” -Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review because is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it. Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display. grief at losing Rosie is profound it is also a revelation. “Unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’s childhood puppet to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull, from lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow (a dog memoir) illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog.Ī New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection Through this lens, we witness Myles’s experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie’s death, Afterglow (a dog memoir) launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet-owner.

During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s well-being, especially in her final days. In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer’s life and work. This newest book paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie. Prolific and widely renowned, Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match” ( New York Review of Books).

Afterglow by Eileen Myles