Book Review: Afterglow: A Dog Memoir by Eileen Myles

Reviewed by Riley Mang

Afterglow: A Dog Memoir
A memoir by Eileen Myles
Grove Press, September 2017
$24.00; 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0802127099

Afterglow: A Dog Memoir is a kaleidoscopic reflection on Eileen Myles’ creative and personal life through the lens of their relationship with their beloved pit bull. The acclaimed poet has masterfully weaved personal history, literary criticism, transcription, images, drawings, poetry, and mythology into this “tapestry” of the human and canine experience. Myles’ most recent foray into the genre of memoir, Afterglow provides their band of devoted fans, new and old, with the unique opportunity to take a stroll beside the author and their deceased dog, Rosie, through their creative life together. Rosie, Myles’ muse, is animated here by their rich, meditative, poetic voice as they reflect on their life as a writer, performance artist, and, above all, dog owner.

The book does not follow a chronological order but rather bobs and weaves through the everyday joys and pains that the two navigate together. The incoherent logic of the book and its oftentimes surreal content are made legible by Myles’ fierce dedication to the quality of each sentence and the truth behind every word. The result is an intimate revealing of Myles’ craft and the divine bond between a dog and her owner. In the chapter “My Dog/My God” they write, “In fact, I’m writing this book to keep talking to [Rosie].”

Most of the book takes place in San Diego where Myles and Rosie live at the end of the dog’s life, anticipating her death. The setting inspires Myles to reflect back on their own life and the point they have reached in their career. They write candidly about enjoying this beached solitude: “People turn and look at me and say she’s here. I’m like a breeze, I’m like punctuation on a text which is them. Which is why I am grateful to be home in California with my dog who is dying. Who is now dead.”

Threaded into the book are transcriptions of narrated walks that Myles and Rosie go on together which Myles videotaped throughout the years. The reader is invited into these archives and witnesses first-hand the poetic banality of the morning ritual. In “xx” Myles writes: “She turns blazing, thirsty white-faced tongue out member of the dead heading home. White stripe of sun on her back. Across the silence I’m calling. I’m your man. She turns and looks back holding still. And she moves which means come. Come with your dumb camera.”

The transcriptions, as well as the book itself, occupy several different time frames; a present in which the narrator and the reader are aware that Rosie is dead, a past in which Rosie is looking back at us, alive and guiding the story, and a mystical time zone in which Rosie speaks from the afterlife. Myles confronts the theme of time as she writes:

Just as a camera has the capacity to go forward and back, rewind; project or establish depth likewise in writing you have a capacity to address in many ways the same sentence. Because in fact reality does not occur in sentences and ever words are hangers on I believe.

The memoir fluctuates between Myles’ early career as a poet and performance artist in New York City and their job as a professor at UC San Diego, a span of time during which they became a queer feminist literary icon. From the vantage point they currently occupy, Myles offers some wisdom about their days as a young writer:

When I moved to New York in the mid ‘70’s my roommate showed me a lesbian poetry magazine called Aphros. I kept throwing my stuff at them and got rejected again and again. I didn’t even like the poems in that magazine. I didn’t know it mattered. I didn’t know about liking yet.

Their politics, a pillar of their identity as a writer, seep gracefully into these chapters such as in “The Navel” where they write: “Gender is a place you have parked your car one day and one day only. That day is your life.” Queerness and gender fluidity have made distinctive marks on Myles’ artistic and personal identities. Today, the author uses the gender pronoun “they,” an identification with multiple genders. As they write from the perspective of Bo Jean Harmonica, an alter ego in “The order of Drinking (3-D),” “I’m a man but there’s a woman in it.”

Myles generously lets their readers into many intimate spaces of their life including their experience with alcoholism and the death of their father, reincarnated as Rosie years later: “My father came again as a dog. . . No joke he came again as dog named Rosie.”

As the prose meanders between cerebral and silly, readers will find resonance in the truths espoused throughout Afterglow, a mosaic portrait of a life dedicated to a dog.

Riley Mang is LAR’s Assistant Managing Editor. Based in France, she also teaches English and writes book reviews.