Life as Seen Through the Leaves

Photo: Shae DeTar

It’s hard not to be nostalgic for New York of the ’70s and early ’80s, after Stonewall but before AIDS. Yes, many gay bars were still mafia-owned, and police harassment was not uncommon; sodomy laws remained until 1980, and the neoliberal dream of gay marriage was (for better or worse) far from anyone’s mind. But you could scrape by on relatively little, dance without the leathery phantom of Giuliani looming over you, and wander the ad-hoc utopia of the Village in blissful ignorance of ketosis or quartz eggs.

And where better to wallow in this misguided nostalgia than the early work of New York literary star Eileen Myles? “It is a comparatively boring/ period in history,” Myles writes cheekily in their 1978 long-form poem “Bird Watching.”