"The Dead & The Living & The Bridge" by MC Hyland
The Dead & the Living & the Bridge by MC Hyland,1 Meekling Press, 2025
One might begin at the end. THE END, one of Hyland’s previous books, is a collection of prose poems that makes an appearance in the final piece in this book, which is a short essay called “Essay on the Prose Poem.” A slippery piece, destabilizing, as the reader is asked to confront what, exactly, the seventeen short “essays” that we just read are—are they indeed essays? Or should they be read as poems? (References to Carson and Montaigne and Stein are as unhelpful as they are helpful.) Poems: in the way they juxtapose thought and image, in the way they peel themselves away, peel away from themselves. Essays: the pursuit of thought, the node, the discursive movement. (We lack good names for text-objects in the land of genre.) I would hazard they are neither, quite, but something else entirely: “passageways,” perhaps, or “portals,” or “numinosities.”
For they are concerned with communion. With parsing the aesthetic sacred. As the book’s title indicates, they seek the intermediate, foray toward the underworld, take up chatter with the dead on all matters of subject. Art and artifact. Vocation and identity. Shakespeare. Material and its manipulation. Some of my favorite pieces from the collection confront the physical elements of bookmaking: paper, ink, thread. “Essay on Ink” in particular conjures the tension between the durability of the book as a technology and the tenuousness of setting ink onto paper. (It’s worth noting that Hyland is a founding editor of DOUBLECROSS PRESS, a micropress that produces handmade chapbooks.) In one scene Hyland finds herself tamping gold leaf with an emery stick: “The gold waves violently as I exhale,” she writes, a beautiful sentence that lifts off the page as gold leaf might under the influence of breath—language itself becomes gold, illuminated, capable of firming like stone to the earth or flitting away with the lightest whisper. It is strenuous, transcendent work, Hyland reminds us, to be the bridge.
Disclaimurmur: MC and I both completed our MFAs at the University of Alabama, and were there at the same time for at least several years. That was ages ago, and we haven’t been in touch since, but MC remains in my memory one of the most grounded, clever, interesting, and talented persons I’ve crossed paths with in my decades on this planet.
I also really love this book—I could say a lot more about it, but in the spirit of keeping shit short, I won’t.