After reading William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, "The Prelude," in her PhD program, poet and publisher MC Hyland became fascinated with the importance of walking with friends in Wordsworth's poetry—and with the ways that writing for his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, unlocked Wordsworth's most powerful voice. She set out on a poetic research project, walking and writing with friends and strangers from the banks of the Mississippi River to the streets of Manhattan, Cambridge University, and a fjord in western Norway.
Along the way she walked with poets Sarah Fox, Fred Schmalz, Stephanie Anderson, Holly Corfield-Carr, Patrick Cabello Hansel, Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Ru Puro, Brian Teare, Christy Davids, Ted Rees, Jared Stanley; playwright Deborah Stein; scholars David Hobbs, Maria Damon, and Tara Menon; family members; visual artists and curators; archivists; and others. After each walk, she wrote a poem for her co-walker or walkers—each poem both a letter and a continuation of the conversation.
This book collects these "walking poems," written between 2015 and 2018 and
originally published in emails and in small handmade books, along with the text of a
subsequent writing project and artist's book, inspired by the poet Bernadette Mayer's
suggestion to keep a notebook of "elaborations on weather." The "weather poems" in
this book record weathers both personal and meteorological, from Brooklyn, New York and Gloucester, MA in the years 2017-2019.
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress. She is 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), as well as a book of short essays, The Dead and the Living and the Bridge (Meekling Press 2025). 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.
"Undercutting the masculinist fantasy of the solitary flâneur gadding about town in dandiacal alienation, MC Hyland writes her walks with others, moving fluently between life and art by transcribing the thinking unique to the discursive space between friends. Like those of her chosen predecessor poets William Wordsworth and Lisa Robertson, Hyland's walks are at once literal and figurative; her linguistic landscapes are shaped by weathers meteorological, historical, economic, and personal. Armed with the belief that it's 'not too late to seek a savable world,' this feminist flâneuse insists on 'the mechanics/of care' in the face of our contemporary polycrisis. She is that comrade walking always bravely toward the next, making thinking livable and living viable as she goes." — Brian Teare, Author of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven and Poem Bitten by a Man
"I have long admired MC Hyland's compass—as writer, editor, political thinker, cultural catalyst—and its artifacts, the 'publishing experiments' that sit face-out like beacons on my shelves. This (re)collection of barely-published writings offers more than an archive, powerfully activating the perspective of delay: allusions to writers and thinkers multiply and constellate, a stray insight becomes retrospectively prophetic, an undertow of humor comes back as a wave, and whatever gap existed between philosophy and poetry shrinks to the space of a breath ('I said / that walking was / the best way to spend / time with a person / but time is of course / the best way'). What a gift to our wayward attentional capacities to spend time with these gathered walks, conversations, and missives, to this glistening record of an eventful half-decade spent in the elastic home of poetry." — Anna Moschovakis, Author of An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth
