In a departure from more rambunctious earlier work, Eileen Myles's Skies is a book of pared-down, cloud-like poems, wisp-like on the page yet as intensely colored as a sunset. Although her work conjures the texture of wind and the broad spaces of the sky, these poems are not serenely pastoral. Rather, Myles' sparse blank verse is concerned with the diaphanous qualities of perception, as if her momentary experiences were as slippery and translucent as clouds. A sometimes brutal loneliness and urgent but stoic sensuality results, finding its expression in simple colors: orange, grey, yellow, white, rose.

Praise for Skies

Eileen Myles has it all—moxie . . . lyric zeal . . . and the anarchic post-feminist energy that has inspired legions of baby dykes to vent in front of the mike. In her new collection, Skies, Myles turns her attention to, well, skies—or, more precisely, skies as the boundless condition for our own coreless, shape-shifting personas . . . meditative, brave, and insouciant, [she] has a limitless gift for marrying poetry with her social agenda.
—The Village Voice