Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems

Author: Eileen Myles

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press (1995)

Maxfield Parrish: Early and New Poems brings together selected work by Eileen Myles from 1978 through 1995. The collection opens with their poems from 1995, which are visceral, erotic, and self-proclaiming, as Myles's robust voice deeply anchors itself in relationships with their own body, other women, and the natural world. The arrangement of poems in this volume allows the reader to follow Myles's vigorous appetite for beauty amidst "all the daily pain / & miserable faces & awful air," as they proudly portray the women in their life in mundane and transcendent settings. Reviling a status quo that can't encompass their life's experiences, they bravely write what they desire, what their anxiety, and their disappointments feel like, recalling what Myles wrote in a 1978 poem, "Homebody": "Nothing's / As fetching as the raw."