Not Me

Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.

This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.

Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine "the rock star of modern poetry," is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.

"Not Me is the biography of an American outlaw... a poet who believes in action as well as acts of imagination." -- The Kenyon Review

"Myles is a female adventurer... a peripatetic poet on a mission to amplify herself and to live large as the heroic anti-hero of her poems." -- Village Voice

"Myles basically talks shit in skinny columns and calls them poems. Thing is, she has one of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit -- honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it." -- Dennis Cooper, Artforum