“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone.

Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles’s own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.  

Praise for Pathetic Literature:

“Huge—and (I hope) hugely influential . . . A collection that makes an argument or, even more, aspires to frame a counter-tradition of literature . . . An anthology rich in allusions: One piece speaks to another across geography and time . . . The weave is so all-encompassing, the associations so multilayered, that I feel like fireworks are popping off inside my head . . . Pathetic Literature represents not so much a collection as it does an ethos: ‘almost a poem,’ its creator observes. These texts and voices take us someplace unexpected, beyond the individual and into the realm of a collective, a tapestry of words that add up to a way of being in the world.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Pathetic Literature surpasses six hundred pages without ever seeming bloated. The book’s ample size gestures to the enormity of the pathetic as an organizing principle or theme, an ecumenical affect that has no fealty to period, place, or genre . . . Thrilling in its unerring quality and lurching pace, Myles’s engaging collection encompasses essays, poems, short stories, letters, and book excerpts from over one hundred authors connected to movements ranging from Magical Realism to the Black Radical Tradition to Romanticism . . . Rejecting the urge to erase, minimize, or turn away from an unsightly feeling, the writers included in this anthology audaciously inhabit a sentiment that society exhorts its high-functioning citizenry to disown. The beautiful, weird aggregate that results is profoundly, pathetically human.”—Cassie Packard, Brooklyn Rail 

“For the quirky and the weird—and who among us is not?—this singularly unexpected assemblage curated by Lambda Award–winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is an anthology like no other . . . What Myles has captured here is simply this: the power of literature.”—Oprah Daily

“Bits and bobs to make you feel, excerpted from poems, plays, and prose, from Franz Kafka to Porochista Khakpour.”—Vanity Fair

“This far-flung, idiosyncratic collection of transgressive poems, plays, and prose is laser-focused on celebrating the outsider. The result is a resplendent affirmation of humanity that has become so essential and necessary today. In the acknowledgments, Myles hints that Too Pathetic might be forthcoming. Let’s hope so.”—ArtsFuse

“In this powerful anthology, poet Myles shares a wide-ranging but deeply focused reading list linked by the concept of pathos . . . The collection amounts to a solid argument for the value of literature that lays bare its author’s personal investment.”—Publishers Weekly

“Maybe the way these pieces relate to each other seems opaque, but I am 672 pages inside Eileen Myles’s head, and it all makes perfect sense to me. Spending time on this book gave me the same feeling that reading Kafka gives me, the same feeling that I’ve been going through the world with after reading nothing but Dennis Cooper for a month or so. I grin to myself—really grin—when I come across both names in Pathetic Literature, feeling like I’ve discovered something incredible, like Myles knows me . . .  I would recommend Pathetic Literature. It’s pessimistic, kinky, and mean. There’s lots of scat and descriptions of genitals. It might depress you, but probably only if you were depressed beforehand. What I know is that I’ll keep the book with me, just like I keep a German copy of Kafka’s diaries on my bedside.”—Noelle McManus, Liber

Praise for Eileen Myles:

“In Eileen Myles’s newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles’s new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet’s previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles’s work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom.”—Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

“Myles’s poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless.”—Maggie Nelson

“Explore[s] and document the limits of language, both visual and literary.”—Artforum, on Evolution

“I loved Evolution . . . Poems that lope along, chatty, restless and limber.”—Olivia Laing, New Statesman

“Eileen Myles’s essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn’t care he has a scar down his face, the thing you just wish you’d said.”—Lena Dunham

Table of Contents

Introduction by Eileen Myles

“Untitled” by Alice Notley

“we’re the only colored people here” by Gwendolyn Brooks

“People Without Names” by The Friend

“Loveland” by Kevin Killian

“Yesterday I Was” by Ama Birch

“Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle” by Andrea Dworkin

“Truth or Consequences” by Ariana Reines