A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Björk to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau''s footsteps on Cape CodPoet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire''s gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet''s eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles''s account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to
