Inferno (a poet's novel)

I finished Eileen Myles' Inferno (a poet's novel) this morning. Sometimes enjoyment of reading is almost frustrating -- this energy energy energy.

That's how I felt reading this, enjoying it so much that I was racing to finish it, and the same time panicked that it would end.

This is a gorgeously singular memoir/novel written in shiningly confident smart prose. Crackling with lovely shots of insight, surfacing beauty. All written with this charmingly disarming muscularity.

That's what happens when a great woman writes.

It's about New York, it's about writers and writing, it's about dykes, it's about history. And I loved it because I'm a fan of Eileen Myles, and it incorporates all that is great in that project. But I also loved it because of the setting and characters, all of which and of whom I have a proximity. This made it more mine.

Some favorite moments, of which there were many:

"I was a 43-year old calendar of shifting desire that summer. Do other women notate their cycle, imagining themselves not an open plain exactly but a pond, not enclosed so much as focused in a way so that the shifting density of my itch, my urge, like a radio station of sex or fertility was now on this setting or that. In some quiet completely absorbing way I read me every day, especially when I was reading. I read my tone which altered along the slope of the month and it would inform me when the reading must end I couldn't bear my body anymore in its fake agreement with my mind, the body then vaulting over the mind's walls."

"We were carrying that message, day and night for about ten years. That's about as long as you get. The houses are open and all you need is about three of you to go everywhere and make these gauzy invisible strings between people. It just makes sense that so many of us had time during the day and would stand in one another's kitchen. Smoking and talking and watching our faces change in the light."

When I finished Inferno I had to go get my eyebrows waxed. I lay on the table buzzing with this story, the words, the poem of it all. A strange woman gently touched me, and then inflicted pain, making me more beautiful.