Not Me

Author: Eileen Myles

Publisher: Semiotext(e) (1991)

This brilliant, incisive volume captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s.

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. They are one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.

"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 basically talks shit in skinny columns and calls them poems. Thing is, [they have] one of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit—honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."

–Dennis Cooper

"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