In Eileen Myles’s newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles’s new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet’s previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America and its politics ... These poems do not decenter the body in exchange for engaging politics; instead they engage the body politic, which here is inescapably against the state ... Myles’s poems make us reconsider what is experience, and does it have an order or is it a simultaneity? We too often believe when we speak of the interior we speak of something singular and known; Myles upends these notions ... It’s no great wonder that Myles has reached what some might call fame now...

Rich in vernacular and innovative line breaks, these poems ask to be read out loud ... Myles crafts poems of personal nature in Evolution. In very short lines, they are also reflective, contemporary, political, erotic and even aphoristic ... Evolution is a triumphant collection that manifests these words from Myles's prose poem 'Notebook, 1981': 'I called it poetry, but it was flesh and time and bread and friends frightened and free enough to want to have another day that way.'

For a well-known poet nearing 70, fame is a not an unreasonable topic, and it's considered here from many angles. The style here mashes politics writ large (Comey, Trump, the Catholic Church, Palestinian sovereignty, civil/women's/gay rights) and things more intimate (beloved dogs, the last days of Myles's mother), with a restless Myles at the center of everything—incanting in a loud and clear voice ... Get in the car and go for a ride with Myles. You'll be entertained—never having to guess what the poet is thinking or where you're being taken.

Evolution returns to many of Myles’s previous themes, their ongoing exploration of gender, sexuality, queerness, urbanity, mortality, art, and radical politics, as well as an infinite fascination with animals and nature: birds, dogs, flowers. But there’s also something that has newly evolved — a crystallized declaration of intent ... there’s no mistaking Myles’s desire to take action and re-thinking what taking action can mean and how it can manifest collectively right now ... Unlike some of Myles’ earlier works, which straddle present and nostalgic modes, Evolution is more focused on attending to what is immediate and urgent ... I’m moved by Evolution, by the grief it marks in cataloging our political and ecological crises, along with more personal losses ... I’m moved by the words of a poet who is willing to explore their own evolution...

Stephen King once said that the problem with being famous is that you’ll drink your own Kool-Aid and believe everything you write is good because you wrote it. In Evolution, Myles suffers from both of these problems ... Is this poetry or a journal entry? Is it interesting? She is writing about being famous I guess ... Myles is using the line breaks with one, or two word lines to create surprise but really there just isn’t much going on here. I was looking forward to reading Evolution but I could have made better use of my time by say, cleaning my room or taking a nap.

... lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York ... gracious to the listening 'you,' even when it pretends, lightly, to preclude it. Together, these poems are a slow-trickling elegy to Myles’s mother that, as they unravel in long, braided strophes, develop into an extended meditation on loss and desire. The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered 'I' ... Myles’s verse often feels typographically paratactic, with its severing of the line—and, even, the word—and lack of horizontal dips and trails across the page. But this spatial slightness precipitates a lyricized and multivocalic 'I'-Myles that, clinging to the left margin, is riveting; that restraint and constant, unceasing compulsion to fracture is the nesting place of the unassuming, difficult mourning with which the book walks, daily, as the months change and the mornings grow quieter and, still, like those long, running sentences, nothing changes, and no one returns from the phantasmagoric dream of the 'still in bed,' asleep—a kind of 'evolution' enacted, each morning, by the living.

Myles...returns to familiar themes in her latest collection, ruminating on sex and intimacy, dogs, politics, and New York City. The collection opens with a speech ... From there, Myles moves into verse, with short, highly enjambed lines evoking a flowing stream-of-consciousness. Myles relentlessly questions, analyzes, and even loathes the self, combining fanciful reveries with non sequitur in the New York School style ... The poems express a forlorn weariness of contemporary politics ... Myles effectively brings vague feelings into sharp relief with surprising imagery...and lighter moments of mockery reveal the contradictions in human behavior ... Myles has long excelled at capturing outsiderness, and feelings of being lost and misunderstood are plenty evident here.