Afterglow is a wry, gorgeous, psychedelic effort to plumb the subject of dog-human partnership —which, in its generic form, is the subject of many cheesy movies and bumper stickers ('Who Rescued Who?') but which, with Myles and Rosie, appears as an exceptional power struggle, a thought experiment about the limits of consciousness, creativity, and love ... There is a destabilizing, unrelenting directness in Myles’s writing, and Afterglow is like the Just Kids of dog books: a punk devotional, shot through with a sort of divine attention to material reality and a poet’s associative leaps ... Here, through Myles’s keen and rough-edged sensibility, all the dog-owner clichés seem revivified and almost occult. How strange it is that one consciousness can do the work of two—that a human can heap words around the wordless soul of an animal and in doing so give it life after death.
Afterglow portrays a complex and often hilarious relationship between two animals, characterized by love and a deep interrogation of power, creativity, and point of view ... Of all the human foibles examined in the book, it is our inability to live in a moment—for the moment—that is most profoundly explored. Some writers portray the experience of raising a child as an opportunity to live a second childhood, at least vicariously. For Myles, it’s a dog that becomes the surrogate, or perhaps the midwife, for a sort of vicarious enlightenment ... Throughout the book, Myles accentuates and diminishes the distance between the multiplying voices and styles. Afterglow becomes an ever-deepening investigation into the nature of human-being-ness, self-knowledge, and knowing things outside of yourself ... A book that’s wise to miscommunication but hungry to overcome it, Afterglow celebrates that rare authorial ability to get out of one’s own way and show us a singular and limber mind roaming free.
Myles did not want to follow up Inferno with another page-turner, a genre unbefitting Afterglow’s subject: the death and afterlife of the author’s beloved pit bull, Rosie. Instead the writer slows it down and complicates the narrative arc in a way that is challenging, at times to the point of bafflement, but ultimately worth it ...many transmutations/migrations of bodies and souls across gender, species, and generations elaborated in the collection of heterogeneous chapters that make up Afterglow ...is composed of disparate, stylistically discrete fragments, but there are touchstones that structure it as memoir, moments one would reliably expect in such an account ... Afterglow is no less 'a poet’s novel' than Inferno, and in its twisty, woven way it is as much a love letter to human family as to its canine counterpart.
If you’ve read Eileen Myles before, you know that her new book is surely not going to be Marley & Me or The Art of Racing in the Rain. You’ll laugh, and you’ll cry, yes, but you’ll also think hard, as you work to pull together the many disparate, cosmic, and charming notions Myles sets forth ... Afterglow is a challenging read that spirals up into big and little thoughts all inspired by her beloved companion, bringing in seemingly unrelated topics along the way such as the 'self-war' of Kurt Cobain, libraries, gender identity, Abu Ghraib, George W. Bush’s farts, and, at some length, sea foam ... Myles writes that she doesn’t want to stop talking to Rosie, that she has written the book, she says, 'to keep talking to her.' Luckily for us, we can eavesdrop on that long, wry, far-flung, and wonderfully loving conversation.
Going back over the painful, at times gruesome, details of Rosie’s decline, Myles is unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. Her grief at losing Rosie is profound; it is also a revelation ... A mind as searching and honest as Myles’s would not be content to explore the commonplace joys and rewards of dog ownership without also looking at the dark side ... Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display. As a prose writer she is naturally, even obsessively, digressive, and the book’s loose, nonlinear form allows her to riff or ruminate on what can seem at times like a maniacal range of subjects ... Given how deeply concerned it is with loss, Afterglow is inescapably a sad book, but, because it is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it. 'It seems you should obviously always be pleasing somebody with your writing but who,” writes Myles. 'That in part is the problem of the writer.' The writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.
I trusted Myles to take me on an engaging journey, and perhaps even change my tepid feelings about man’s best friend. Myles did both of those things, as well as redefined my concept of what a memoir can be, as Afterglow is a multi genre tapestry seen through the perspective of both human and dog ... The attempt to translate the written word into a type of meditation is mesmerizing. Myles defies conventional narrative in the pursuit of enlightenment: the pure and heightened perception of the dog ... Myles ultimately succeeds in honoring Rosie’s life not through sentimental reflections or expositions of grief, but by embodying the wisdom of the dog: to breathe in every smell on the street, and to be here, now.
Ever since Marley & Me was published in 2005, the litter of literary tributes to beloved bow-wows has become so vast and formulaic that a universal spaying of the genre is called for. But Afterglow is a mutt elegy in a million ... Through all this weirdness, 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 ... Myles takes chances with form: Sometimes they flop into incomprehensibility; but, overall, Afterglow works. It's raw and affecting, and in its wild snuffling way, utterly original.
Myles’ matter-of-fact prose doesn’t make the book any less wrenching to read, nor does telling the story of Rosie’s death early in the book reduce the pain of a primally moving narrative ... Despite the book’s unorthodox structure, the overarching theme in Afterglow, namely how Rosie fundamentally altered Myles’ life for the better, is a familiar one in narratives of humans and animals. And for all of the ways in which Myles remembers Rosie, the book also reveals a tremendous sense of absence and loss ... With great candor, Myles uses the emotional intimacy of a human’s relationship with a dog to discuss larger questions of emotional intimacy. Early in the book, Myles recollects a reading where, 'I read a long one about dogs I wrote before I ever even had one. It was about attachment. How I wanted it. Needed it.' That could well be an epigraph for the narrative that follows: Through its idiosyncrasy and specificity, Afterglow illustrates the lasting bond between humans and dogs in a new way.
Afterglow is subtitled '(a dog memoir),' but it is also a study in the best kind of anthropomorphism; it examines Myles’ relationship with Rosie, the dog’s dying, and the grief that followed ... It is poetry, it is fiction, it is monologue and screenplay with diagrams and drawings. A dizzying pastiche standing on four legs, next to two ... Myles did what she teaches her writing students, and followed prompts made from a 'catalog' of Rosie’s things.
There are chapters of the book that meditate on this question, punctuated by transcriptions of videos Myles took on their walks with Rosie. These transcriptions are the most Instagram-like, and the most poignant, moments in the memoir ... meditations on true social connections versus more artificial ones might seem tangential to a book subtitled (a dog memoir), but Myles threads this idea through their reflections on their relationship with Rosie ... While Afterglow can be read as celebration of the tenets of Instagram — offhanded, imagistic self-expression that’s shared widely, and alive in its openness to interpretation — Myles has been writing about these ideas for years, long before the advent of apps.
Poetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.
The universal theme of attachment shines through in Eileen Myles’ unconventional Afterglow ...is the story of Rosie, Myles’ canine companion from 1990 to 2006. It ventures into some of the places one might expect from an account of owning a dog from puppyhood until its death, including a number of moving descriptions of Rosie’s physical decline at the end of her life ... Myles’ matter-of-fact prose doesn’t make the book any less wrenching to read, nor does telling the story of Rosie’s death early in the book reduce the pain of a primally moving narrative ... Myles makes forays into the philosophical, the experimental and the absurd... Through its idiosyncrasy and specificity, Afterglow illustrates the lasting bond between humans and dogs in a new way.
Inspired by Rosie’s death, Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy ... Though there are occasional meandering thematic digressions, these seem a part of the journey. Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight.
In hopscotching from poetic monologues to intensely rendered memories, ideological pronouncements to a comic dialogue between Rosie and the author’s childhood puppet, Myles has fashioned an eccentric, fitfully engaging and finally vexing work … Afterglow ranges widely and freely through time, geographical space (New York, San Diego, Ireland) and topics. Myles takes up, often fleetingly, gender politics, her father’s alcoholism, the physical and emotional qualities of foam, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the nature of good and evil … In its recollections of connection and loss, Afterglow has more than a few piercing insights. The problem is how frequently they get lost in the fog.
Eileen 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.
Myles divides the book into a series of mostly brief episodes—some true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tone—that reflect Rosie’s thoughts as well as the author’s experiences with her own thoughts, but it never becomes overly nostalgic or sad ... Rarely too heavy to be approachable, Myles’ work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. A captivating look at a poet’s repeated attempt 'to dig a hole in eternity' through language.
But Eileen Myles’s Afterglow belongs in a strange category of its own – it is unlike anything I have read and is a work of Joycean ambition in comparison with, say, John Grogan’s popular bestseller Marley and Me ... For all its dog-leg turns, there is no putting down of Rosie or of this book.
