The Dead & The Living & The Bridge
by MC Hyland
Paperback
with illustrations by Jeff Peterson
100 pages
Publication date: 4/1/2025
ISBN 978-1-950987-56-6
$18 (Order Online)
In the tradition of Montaigne and Anne Carson, MC Hyland’s collection of poem-essays integrate the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight like the ripple of a stream’s surface over a submerged rock. Originating from a moment (both pre- and mid- pandemic) when Hyland taught canonical British literature as a contingent university worker, the essays in The Dead and the Living and the Bridge take up the topics of grief, art materials, capitalism, and close reading. Within, Hyland’s voice casts spells to summon clarity against institutional failures and personal and global losses, while placing thinking in its proper context: conversation, shared worldbuilding, and a love that touches both the living and the dead.
About the Author
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, and the author of over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books and two previous full-length books of poems: THE END (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010). Holding MFAs in book arts and creative writing from the University of Alabama and a PhD in English literature from NYU, MC is a teacher, scholar, artist, and arts administrator, and lives in St. Paul, MN with her partner, Jeff, and cat, Dakota.
Praise for The Dead & The Living & The Bridge
“MC Hyland’s The Dead and the Living and the Bridge is an enchanting and fully-imagined book. A series of precise essays, its voice is curious, meditative and full of care. As language, world, idea, and instance interconnect, extend, unfold, and articulate, the text reminds us that experience and phenomena are continuous. ‘I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature…I accumulated a small log of instances…’ Hyland writes. In this way, she discloses moments, and we uncover them along with her. In the space of disclosure we find life and thought, image and grief existing side-by-side. What is a bridge for? For joining what may have only seemed separate before, in seeing, one could see it whole.” – Danika Stegeman, author of Ablation
“By taking seriously how writing ‘is not equivalent to speech,’ Hyland’s sinuous ‘essays’ pursue a directness not in service of simplicity but proliferation—of connection, resemblance, mystery. The digital cloud seems to crowd out the weather even as the isolated poet turns to the sky and the birds. In flexible but rigorous prose objects, Hyland tracks how language runs up against its limits in the book and the body, in the institution and its ideology. ‘I open a window and pour in feeling,’ she writes. From her hands, pen, and type the poem becomes a thought and the essay becomes a poem. The window and the feeling are each as real, and each as unreal, as the other.” – S. Brook Corfman, author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites