MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

 

In a museum in Oslo, we found a whole room of cloud studies. The small painted clouds transferred the light of another time and country directly into our faces. Though O’Hara thought that the clouds get enough attention as it is, it seemed as though we had never properly perceived their indexical charms. (“Essay on Weather”)

I’m very pleased to see a new title by St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet, editor and publisherMC Hyland—following THE END (Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks (including one through above/ground press)—their full-length The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Chicago IL: Meekling Press, 2025). “My language possessed by adverbs of suddenness,” she writes as part of “Essay on Weather,” “of incremental change.” Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next. As Hyland writes as part of “Essay on Vocation”:

Lewis Hyde writes When we are in the spirit of the gift we love to feel the body open outward. Perhaps this is the narcotic condition produced by certain of the windowless rooms. The body blooms into one set of relationships, while at the same time the person is fixed by larger systems into a position of contingency and debt. To step away, as I stepped unwillingly away from my old love, is both heartbreak and survival.