[10/28/25] Hyland, MC: Walks & Weathers: Publishing Experiments 2015-2019

Beauty School Editions, paperback

Publication Date: October 28, 2025

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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.