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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today my guest is Eileen Miles.

Eileen has been an ongoing guest on Bookworm.

And then came this new book, Evolution.

It's published by Grove Press.

I think it's a great book of poetry, not just a good one.

It's astonishing in so many ways, the first of which is that most books of poetry are, what, 60, 70 pages long?

Well, it's a big book, 219 pages of poems by Eileen Miles, but it's been very easy to talk about her with reference to Walt Whitman.

And now Walt Whitman contains multitudes.

And as I understand it, you've recently chosen your pronoun.

Oh, oh, yes, yes, yes.

I was wondering how I was going to, I thought I would just casually call myself day and see what happened.

And what happened?

I mean, for me, part of it is, you know, I'm in my 60s.

I've been a known lesbian, a queer forever. And I've always written in a way that is sort of transgender and that my narrator sometimes is male, sometimes is female, though I speak a lot for female rights and feminism and the female body and queerness. But I think I just had a revelation, I think a couple of years ago when I was dating Jill

Salloway and there was a lot of talk about trans stuff in my, you know, in my public life.

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