Cool for you

by Eileen Myles

*Cool For You* is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. *Cool For You*'s tough girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State.