Books
My full-length collection Late Epistle, winner of Sappho’s Prize in Poetry for 2022, is now out from Headmistress Press. Order it from the Headmistress store, Amazon, or Bookshop.org, or directly through your local bookstore. If you’re in Greensboro or want to support my favorite store, please buy it through Scuppernong Books — they ship!
“Late Epistle is a rare first book, one that radiates all the pleasures of poetry— sound, form, and figurative language, among others—but also one that evidences a life transformed by discovery. Read and marvel at Anne Myles’s prowess, then read again to be forever changed by her vulnerability and depth of feeling. This ‘dark and lustrous’ book permits entry into the ‘not-yet-known’ with miraculous clarity.”
—Natasha Sajé
“Muriel Rukeyser asks, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’ In this candid, emphatically visceral collection, Anne Myles speaks her truth with unflinching ardency, astonishing the reader with poems that are both masterfully crafted and strikingly forthright. Reading this book, I experienced the pure delight of a strongly female voice claiming its identity and purpose.”
—Martha Silano
“A sensual imagination informs these poems with startling images and line turns that astonish. I love the childhood narratives, the family sadnesses and secrets revealed, the tender, wise observations. Formally inventive, the poems that showcase a woman-loving-woman anchor the speaker in a story of self-invention and a sustainable life.”
—Robin Becker
“In Late Epistle, Anne Myles has given us a thoughtful and moving account of her journey to become a poet, singing in a voice (Athena-like, sprung fully formed) that is lyrical and tender, honest and unsparing. In poems of family, loss, love, grief, and the ongoing quest to find and express the true self, the deep intelligence of the work shines through in evocative imagery, lovely language, and subtle yet effective uses of form.”
—Moira Egan
What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). Now in its second printing! Order directly from Final Thursday Press or from Amazon. Also in stock at Scuppernong Books.
This (long) chapbook examines the life of the 17th-century New England Quaker martyr Mary Barrett Dyer, a lasting icon of female resistance to unjust power. A sequence of 28 poems explores Dyer’s amazing life story of radical devotion and courage, her attachment to the Antinomian leader Anne Hutchinson, the complex bond I have long felt with her, and the fraught longing to touch and know the distant past.
“Anne Myles has done a remarkable thing, chronicling the outer and imagining the inner life of Mary Dyer, a Quaker woman who was hanged in Boston in 1660. These elegant and beautiful poems explore what thought and longing might enable a woman to defy the closed world of Puritan Boston. . . . This is the gift poetry gives to history, that ability to imagine and draw close to lives distant in time, but near in desires and tensions. This book is a gift to us all, and crucial in our own troubled time.”
— Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems
“What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer gives voice to one of early American literature’s most fascinating forgotten women, a 17th-century New England Antinomian and Quaker martyr whose exit from the meetinghouse at Anne Hutchinson’s side was only the beginning. Anne Myles realizes Mary Dyer in poetry that sings of loss, of courage, of everyday textures and momentous occasions as experienced by a solitary subject. Myles comes to her predecessor unguarded, one ‘courageous and troublesome woman’ to another, buoyed by scholarly insight to embody an astonishing historical figure in lyric form so that she should never again be lost.”
— Marion Rust, Editor, Early American Literature
Final Thursday Press also published a limited-edition three-poem micro-chapbook of my work, Circumference, in 2019. Available as a gift from the author.