COOL FOR YOU - Eileen Myles
(Soft Skull Press)
reviewed by Janet Mason
Cool for You is a visceral experience filled with smells ("sweet decay"); tastes ("very cheddary"); and sounds ("clank"). Eileen, ever true to her essential poet self, uses language as a time machine, in one instance transporting herself into the future through the sound of a name of the mother of a girlhood acquaintance (Janice Oaks) who showed up a poetry reading that Eileen gave 40 years later in Santa Fe.
In Cool for You the time frame is Now.
Everything is happening at once.
As Eileen examines the awe in ordinary things, a kind of reverence shines through the pages, laced with a slant of morning light. In writing about summer camp where she was a counselor-and because of "an inferior sense of work" spent afternoons tanning herself and reading-she writes about a camper named Lucy, who she describes as a "perfect girl boy."
"Lucy loved me. I loved her. Shyly, we walked down the paths through the woods, and I would not have dreamed of touching her, she was more like my religion. But we would be beautiful, I knew that too. I liked her blue sneakers. I loved her little shirts. Even though she was a boy and I was her big sister I could see that she knew I was kind of male too. The sun shone on her hair like butterscotch and I was in love."
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