Sorry, Tree [Paperback]

Eileen Myles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2007

“One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature—honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it.”—Dennis Cooper

Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB in 1974. BUST magazine calls her “the rock star of modern poetry” and The New York Times says she’s “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde.”

Myles’ trademark punk-lesbian sensibility and intimate knowledge of poetic tradition are at work in this eighth collection, where every love poem is political, and every political poem is, ultimately, about love.

From “Home”:

I thought if
I inventoried home it would be broad
my eyes fling open
like a doll’s
to the virtual space that suddenly
resembles the walls
the most interesting artists are large;
monsters
while the people we know are
masses of flowers
& when I turn
on my cellphone I see
everyone

Eileen Myles has published over a dozen books of poetry, prose, and plays. Formerly the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, as well as a write-in candidate for president in 1992, she now teaches at the University of California, San Diego. In 1997 Myles toured with Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show. Her books include Skies, on my way, Cool for You (a novel), School of Fish, Maxfield Parrish, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls (stories).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her signature short, piercingly demotic lines, Myles (Skies) fiercely mines concatenated observations for the raw stuff: "it's like genitals/ I want to show you all these tiny parts." Myles has, by her own count, written "thousands of poems," and now finds information and aesthetic pleasure in almost anything: "I agree/ It's a good place to shit," or as a poem titled "Culture" puts it: "It accepts all/ marks & none/ So I'll just write/ into it." Myles's short descriptive bursts read like object lessons in an unfailing and unflinching fidelity to experience, which has its own rewards: "You are the candy melting/ in my mouth./ Is that a euphemism/ For what? Witnessing your love." One poem tries to delineate British and American English— "the words were never/the same again"; another tries to pin down involuntary convulsions of beauty—"Why is light/ so damn emotional/ if it's just/ a burning star." (Apr.)
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Review

"Myles is a poet with a history who writes about history, her personal history and our political history, and how the two intertwine and can't be separated, even if we might want them to." —Kathleen Rooney, Open Letters

"Sorry, Tree is a...funny title for a book. Especially for a book of poetry, that nervous species of writing that sometimes wonders whether it's worth the paper it's printed on. And especially for a book by Eileen Myles, whose poetry -whether it's about being lovesick or on a boat full of barfing people or surrounded by conservative zealots - is the opposite of apologetic. Historically speaking, Myles is the last stop of the New York School and the beginning of punk-rock poetry." —Brenden Kiley, The Stranger

"Myles’ poems feel as though they were written while moving and they’re good. The poems travel distances in line breaks and between words. The language has a pulse..." —Gina Myers, Octopus Magazine

"Sorry, Tree is flat out a terrific book, joining what seem to be the simplest personal poems with a poetic craft that dazzles." —Ron Silliman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 83 pages
• Publisher: Wave Books; 1St Edition edition (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933517204
• ISBN-13: 978-1933517209
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #267,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sorry, Haters, March 30, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sorry, Tree (Paperback)

I've been a fan of Eileen Myles for decades since I first saw her give a reading, with Michael Lally and Tim Dlugos so you know it's got to have been a long time ago.

She would tip her hat to people like John Wieners and James Schuyler but she was always herself, people dubbed her the female this or that (like "the female Ted Berrigan") but that wasn't what she was about. Everytime she was pegged she shrugged her shoulders like Samson and brought down the pegs and the ropes around her, and the roofs and the ceilings of the master's stone buildings. Her line could sometimes be "Schuyler-esque" (and in the new book there's even a Schuyleresque *title,* "April 7) but in the long body of history, I think, Schuyler will be seen to have forecast Myles, rather than have influenced her, because you can forecast the weather but how are you going to influence it--except with the evil global warming of which Jimmy S would have been incapable even in metaphor.

"A book is/ a web I suppose," writes Myles, in "Fifty-Three," but this isn't going to be one of those dreary poems about, what is a book? "A book is/ a web I suppose/ saying you come/ here to go/ out an/ incessant/ trembling bridge/ which a tree/ is/ I imagine." At first I thought the book, with that title, SORRY, TREE, was going be a wry apology for cutting down the tree to make the pulp onto which the book is spread, like jam. But hurray, that's not what the title is alluding to! (I read this part, with the lyrics of that Serge Gainsbourg tune skipping through my brain: "Sorry angel/ Sorry so.") Myles has often included, in her books of "poetry," some sort of prose essay, or manifesto, around which the poems accrete and gain meaning; maybe these prose pieces are also there to detourne the shape of the book, to make it not all poetry, for Myles is a well known despiser of genre's segregations. In SORRY, TREE we get "Everyday Barf," which starts out as a simple tale of seasickness on a ferry to Provincetown, and becomes, very quickly, an analysis of everything right and wrong in our world, and everything true and false about the individual in it. I heard Myles read "Everyday Barf" in a darkened performance hall in Los Angeles in the Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall three years back, at the "Seance" conference organized by CalArts. It was a day of extraordinary papers, from everyone from Shelley Jackson to Dennis Cooper to Madeline Gins, but this was the most exhilarating, a ship in a bottle she sent flying through wet and salty air--and we were in it like little people. Like the tiny leaves on the trees here in California.

Last time around she published SKIES, which deliberately limited its subject matter, like an Oulipo constraint, and found variety everywhere, but it wasn't my favorite by her. I almost said that SORRY, TREE is what I like, except its newness is still bewildering. In publishing SORRY, TREE Wave Books has upped the ante on themselves, for in one move, releasing a new book by one of the world's greatest poets has put their previous books all in the shade. They have all of them been adequate, even fine books, perfectly serviceable, but that's like saying a breeze has been perfectly serviceable but when a hurricane blows into town you don't notice the breeze any longer, does it even exist?