RaveThe Seattle Review of BooksEileen Myles’ new book, Afterglow (a dog memoir), is not to be shrugged off. What Myles (doggedly?) crafted over a period of nearly twenty years is actually a writer’s diary, a sacred text … Because witnessing death is a sort of schizophrenia, an honor and a trauma that can activate muteness, it is a welcome aspect of Afterglow that Myles creates shifts in voice and point of view throughout. The book is womb-like, full of water imagery; piss comes often, and it must be washed, on repeat, until we are swimming in it in the methodical or frantic way our speaker does … Afterglow is an exercise in corporeal writing and re-writing of Myles’ own history: living on the burned edges of being and not being, of choosing and not choosing.
