Neveragainland

NEV ERA GAIN LAND

NEV ERA GAIN LAND MC HYL AND

Neveragainland Copyright 2010 MC Hyland All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Cover design and photo by Jeff Peterson Published by Lowbrow Books www.lowbrowbooks.com ISBN: 978-0-9829553-1-4

for Jeff—

CONTENTS Diegetic

15

I: The Parade of Brightly Colored Flags Epistolary 19 collage1: about the leap of faith, 20 I bring a dowry of conflagration.

21 Propaganda Suite (i) 22 collage 2: Women on Film 24 “Bird, how beautifully you sing!�

25 The book of coming forth in evening 26 collage 3: This view of 28 [four short plays] 29 collage 4: Longing on a large scale 33 The book of glories 34 II: Residential, as in (absent plural) 37 residential, as in 38

III: Ballet Mécanique collage 5: Bright lights zoom through you 63 Ballet Mécanique (i) 64 Ballet Mécanique (ii) 66 Ballet Mécanique (iii) 68 collage 6: Neveragainland 70 Strange Reports 71 collage 7: Cinema Muto 73 Propaganda suite (ii) 74 Dear ________, 76 Telling stories with the angel of death 77 collage 8: Dear old Alex, I will re79 1518 Spruce Place 80 Notes

83

Acknowledgements About the author

85 87

DIEGETIC Begin with a mountain, ice shearing off.

Blue as though inwardly lit & sheet metal shook. A wash of terrible cold crosses the ocean. Now a car lumps across a moldering map. A gesture extinguishing itself leaves incomplete traces.

*

Direct address to troublesome mountain: This skin fits ill. I will the loathsome library to origami upon itself.

*

The Speaker sits at a wooden table solid as battle. The Speaker equals an axe or adze. The table trembles.

The Speaker discards her clothing, beats linen into unravel. This is a sheet of paper, with a memory of skin it clothed. The Speaker writes in pen: Let me take my linguistic form. In the story, which the world is. Bitterns, almonds, a hundred spoken signs. Radiator ticks & the word-hoard gathers. Little speaker, burning body to fuel.

15

THE PARADE OF BRIGHTLY COLORED FLAGS

EPISTOLARY I am a handsome and lonely man.

I like to write these letters to the housewives:

Dear Betty, I am a handsome

and lonely man. I appreciate

your zinnias and Buick. RSVP. I seal them in envelopes made from top-secret blueprints. Then they get intercepted by my ex-girlfriends in the postal service.

Dearest, I have sabotaged the factories of sleep.

I drive around and around the abandoned worksite, taking photographs. Smug workers, sealed in their plexiglass pods. I cry out to them: Vive la television! Abajo las manzanitas!

Will you write to me? I confess to the housewives everything, everything. I could curl your hair around my wrist like a shackle. I could draw our path on every map in the atlas. Look: we are crossing the Atlas mountains. It is like The Sound of Music without the element of escape. I am singing you a song that I wrote for the people of my country about their beautiful, beautiful smiles.

When we get to the other side, there will be a house with steaming coffee and pancakes.

I will stitch this letter into my arm.

19

ABOUT THE LEAP OF FAITH, I don’t believe I did.

Every little window gains importance!

You were filling a bucket and kicking a hole in it.

The heart of the scandal— a hollow chamber in the middle.

February 27, 2006

20

I BRING A DOWRY OF CONFLAGRATION. Birds sing all night in the sodium haze, but let the wedding begin. The bride is asleep on a bed of books, pages turning in wind.

Dear wind. Dear countryside, I will wed you to the tune of fifty starlings lifting from this flooded field. I will come to you through dreams: a body embraced by the soil from whence it sprung, troubled form of the Gospel-ridden South.

I hold a fire that burns away the meek stones of forgiveness. A hunger in it for these bodies, this famine and flood.

The lover will annihilate the beloved after the fashion of an unpainted house: first the littered backyard, then the whole place goes up.

21

PROPAGANDA SUITE i: Chairman Mao is the Red Sun in the Revolutionary People’s Hearts Someone filled my chest cavity with marbles: ducks, peawees, superboys, commies, lutzes & bumboozers. When my ribs broke, some shattered, some clouded and cracked.

Dear chairman, what’s the weather where you are?

Anagogic interpretation remains far from ensured.

Rick James walks out of the library and the afternoon is suddenly skirted, frisking.

Puppy in the department store, panting up the aisles. The bloggers in one another’s arms, Abandoned Motherboard City.

Chairman, come dance with me the tango of agrarian reform.

Chairman, there’s a run in my stocking. This afternoon is so for real.

The peasants on the 39 bus, they’re cruising the suburbs in their blue jumpsuits. I think they want to rumble.

Chairman, the Motherland’s rivers are all covered in red. And here you are, so bodiless and beatific.

22

ii: Let Us Follow Closely Chairman Mao In the Storm!

Look out, Chairman! There’s a tiger everywhere!

A hail of primary colors, scratchings in the walls.

Children scurry through the curious wreckage.

Yesterday I said to you: Let’s please step out in the lemony daylight.

Let’s play hide and seek beneath the jade-like firmament!

As the commune spills into stubbly fields, a gilded afternoon.

A flood of glistening products from the secondhand store.

Satellites twirl from the sky like upside-down wings of maple seeds. The people’s guilt machine blows steam in F sharp. Dear chairman, the rains are over, and a hundred flowers bloom. Dear chairman, take me driving, please, in your convertible car.

23

WOMEN ON FILM They had images of serpents like pickup sticks.

A species that doesn’t yet have a name.

He gives their titles—

Jeu de Cartes

livid heiroglyph

darning needle In an imitation of what it means to be a man, I drove five hours, through the Lillooet Range.

[I am such a bad criminal!]

Then the cutting began.

The steam pouring off the baby returned to a temperate glacial basin.

It is paper-thin—

24

October 9, 2006

“BIRD, HOW BEAUTIFULLY YOU SING!” O makes a hole in the firmament & we treble through.

Under cover of high notes, the skin slips under covers. The wolf hiding.

&&&

This song could be your bright bridge into sleep:

ovary stolen from sleeping child floweret buried in the bridal bouquet

Your poor mouth sore from clenching. Redder than the rose.

o wolf, millstone, angered engendered nightingale o strewn emblem, vacuous, pulsative

Long tunnel made from birdsong, the sky arcing meanly.

Inky smell outside in the milky night.

&&&

Where are you? Talking to the wind, wedded to the ropemaker’s daughter.

This other world on you, your body fits strange.

25

THE BOOK OF COMING FORTH IN EVENING As the sun sets the park turns blinding green.

Down by the pond, no loose stones for throwing.

Sidewalks in this place are cracked, shook.

In this place there are several crimes punishable by death.

None are written in this book, none are written by this hand.

The mothers push their children, the wheels go around.

The blue and mauve ocean cuts across itself.

You will build a high roof to lie beneath.

You will be buried with an army of clay.

Missionaries come in from the Midwest.

You will return to the dust that made you.

God is blond, and loves you, though not as you are now.

If your left hand knows your right, cut away its flesh.

You will walk to the trees at the top of the hill.

You will wake to a hand pressed hard on your wrist.

The hand of God is harsh and tells no tales.

Here is a bridge, a stone, a slipping.

What you touch passes away before you lift your eyes.

A body burned with gasoline, with kerosene, a lamp.

A broken toothed moon gnawing through the sky.

In the park, breathing. On the hill, breathing.

What if the air loves your body best of all?

Your eyes tongued closed at close of day.

The missionaries sleeping on beds of smooth stone.

26

This is not the end of days, or of nights.

Sky painted salmon with monoxide and ozone.

You ride a bicycle through the emptied city.

You tell no tales. You drink no water.

The river slows, swallows. Tempest at the mouth.

Tell no one what your right hand knows.

Tell no one which of these crimes was yours.

The hill becomes a mountain, and you climb.

The body of God is a slipping, a darkened slope.

27

THIS VIEW OF happiness is essentially tragic: the failure of all other ideologies rained sulfur and brine onto the houses, into the cisterns, over the trees.

To lead a good life, Alex, I washed the coffins out of their vaults and sent them floating down to sea level.

A dozen fluorescent tubes dangled low.

In a cauldron they were boiling palliatives and partial remedies.

To try the potentially ridiculous gesture at once transparent and enveloping, I said your nom de guerre.

A dead cow hanging in a tree hidden by a cloth, ascending to heaven looked like twisted paper, like the White Rose.

A vicarious kind of ecstasy perpetually flooded with artificial light.

28

February 27, 2006

[FOUR SHORT PLAYS] split-level funhouse clouds are both fluffy and sinister. shifting nervously toward the horizon. from offstage, a woman’s achy voice: you can come down from your treehouse. the war is almost over. harsh green spotlight. framed in the doorway at dusk. the officer of the law. y’all too grown for this. taking the gun from my hand.

29

iceberg! iceberg! dust suspended in projector-beam. blue side of glacier. slipping. smash! bedsheet shaken by hidden hands. sad-eyed polar bear or sad-eyed actor. soliloquy. thus ends sad bear, hungry, alone. actor eats fish with feet. sails off stage left.

30

a coastline play flooded forest. no leaves rustle. ballerina as roseate spoonbill. flush of pink tulle. rises through leafless trees. a boat carved from a single trunk. an alligator or floating log. suspended on wires. vivaldi crackles through tinny speakers. he died a pauper in 1741.

31

a play about ghosts the maiden turned ghost enters the heart by means of a ramp around the room. lub-dub. the maiden wears a white gown. a crown of scratched syntax. the lover. the dancing bear at the end of its tether. when the army descends upon the village. the curtain rises and rises. into a bank of clouds.

32

LONGING ON A LARGE SCALE is the tide of inheritance, an inner untidiness too vast to be false.

We are not present at the creation of anything.

Within hours of leaving the theatre, I heard of two men wrestling underwater, two men dressed in white shoving his frail body forward to see the sutures tucked into Mylar sleeves.

Just beneath her skin, everything is turning to ashes.

The effect is like materialized music.

A set of gilded frames whip and buckle like a torn sail.

The tomblike silence crushed under her heel is an anagram of his name.

From a single sleep, she is in the air, in his arms, wrapped in the dark web of a fish net.

June 11& 18, 2008

33

THE BOOK OF GLORIES Frail shimmers sheltered in trashheaps. Dust mills in air, silvers sunlight. Still kitchen, silent. Rift between outside and in, the warm gentling through.

Morning creaks like a rusted winch. Thus: this shining mundane. This fragile windowsill, pollen-dusted. This becoming.

This array of greens, shone through, breathing. This road from your door downhill for miles. Let the summer remember. Let the rains come, spill up through veins of trees. Let the rains come, even in anger.

All this vouchsafed. The hill reclines, drenched. Bruised & glorying; slick wishes of late summer.

Skin licked by rain, by the close brushes. & wound through chainlink, terse vines, a hundred sorrowing purples.

34

RESIDENTIAL, AS IN

(ABSENT PLURAL)

cipher. cipher. let time slip through this isolation, as nation so self. as self, so submarine & therefore undering. therefore reticent & glow.

37

RESIDENTIAL, AS IN

incremental. as in built. as in tires & clay, windshield, straw. as in gunmetal sky, tornado, heat. as in dogtrot. inverted roof, wings & gripped down in soil. as in here is the church made of two hands. opened. crowd.

38

a house is a house only in isolation. an interior space. if skin is other than skin. if bones form a frame. repeat this motion, homing. repeat this sound. buildings made of breath. vibration. a refrigerator coos inside your stomach. you are particle. molding.

39

house of severed heads house of lunar aureole house of diffidence house of underwater luminosity house of detractors house of distraction house of hollow chambers

40

living funny in rented rooms. television all night & abandoned text of the front door. says enter. syntactic & wooden. says let all the bats out into nightliness. let all the raccoons of the neighborhood stand on hind feet sniffing for you on the air.

41

refrigerator which sounds like a bird trapped in the house haunted by bees. this is not the movie we thought we’d be making.

42

residential as in residue, as in provident. as in body at red dawn. gasflame massed. crouched below the iron pot.

43

how the body responds to this homing & light. as though solemnity. as though a hand. as sunrise deferred, a lateness of season.

44

a house is a house only as past expands to fill. the new architecture like the old architecture. about loss. no sooner built than declining, rain in the eaves. abandoned architecture of intention. abandoned architecture of failure to speak.

45

wanting to smell your hair, a thing which has come from you & is already dead. report what the television says to the windows. report their reply to potted basil on the sill. leave a map in every room exactly the size & shape of that room.

46

dialectic: cleanliness & godliness, scrubbed linoleum & silence between walls. if hopefulness is next to waywardness. if the popular front of the house opens to reveal jeweled miniatures, thumping floorboards of upstairs strangeness. brass chandeliers grown black with tarnish.

47

house of arterial blockage house of forgotten siblings house of impatience house of undeniability house of sleeping dogs house of the improbable

48

as in excrescence. for every body a body again. food shelter water & a window through which breezes might pass. look at this skin. how it ages. how it wears. my room has got two windows/ but the sunlight never comes through

49

if reticent, then provident if repentant, then ascend if exhaustion, then lightning if therefore, then breathe if hostage, then Texas if pharmaceutical, then substitute if human, then undering if abject, then bells

50

what pipes & warmth moving from floor to floor. what winter. a bevy of forgotten beneath snow obscured. teeth vulnerable, slow disintegration under coats of sugar.

51

this is not the movie we thought would make us, low comedy salving the winter. write me when you get to Texas, open my body into something new. write me when you get to Texas to say that the house is growing larger. countryside shifting in reference.

52

living room to kitchen, kitchen to living room. living demands room, rooms, & breath to fill them. noun, noun. shoes on the floor.

53

the body’s turning in on itself. body left without food. ragged left, ragged remnant. these stanzas. little rooms.

54

in this house of my dead & the dead they carry with them. they are burying the letters by the live oak. they are calling indecipherable words into all the dusks of summer. murderous summer in the split small towns. murderous soil turned suddenly walls.

55

SCALE 1:1; the bookcase is a precipice best scaled by night; the front door groans and opens in the upstairs closet of your childhood home. the closet with the circular window. read right for up; so climb the narrow stairs. light bulb swings & shadows lurch, leer.

56

house of malingering house of discontinued correspondence house of wanderlust house of foxed leaves

57

& then you. how northward you are. how glowing. how snowed.

58

so gripped by unnameable on hands & knees dusting baseboards with paper towels. so neglect the body. remove the house from itself. your hand here framed in the doorway at dusk. the milk of memory sours.

59

& so the house creaks & settles. a thing which comes from you & is already dead. all your dead laid end-to-end in the hallway. eyes to ceiling. sing.

60

BALLET MÉCANIQUE

BRIGHT LIGHTS ZOOM THROUGH YOU like the knowledge of dead languages, snippets of fading bulletins far off the Virgilian grid.

Glittering rows of swooped and petalled architecture looked for clues beneath the easygoing American sun.

A Plexiglass cube made of smaller, identical cubes held together only by gravity—

Reach down and shake me.

“We’re going to be absolutely vacant,” I found myself saying—my voice abnormally loud—

June 11 & 18, 2008

63

BALLET MÉCANIQUE (I) I had lost interest in the body, the cold giver of light.

We traded clothes. I asked the house, Who do you think you are? but had to answer for it. We wanted what we had, but different. We wanted our lives to happen without us.

The missionaries unlocked the word-hoard, but wouldn’t share with us what they found there.

They gave us juice instead, in paper cups.

There may have been love, but it masqueraded as rain eating slowly through the abandoned schoolbus.

Then winter came on, scratchy with stars, and we walked through the night to stay warm. Our lungs, damp machines.

Reeling on the public lawn, I said to the field, This body is an emptiness bruised by sound. The house shuttered. The missionaries dug in the staked-out floodplains, archaeologies of half-truths and caution tape. Seasons fell away, creaking on the doorjambs.

64

Our bodies thickened, pulled down towards the earth. It wasn’t, exactly, death that we feared, though our bodies held that also. Quiet among the haut-parleurs, I turned the crank, kept my hand steady as a viper.

65

BALLET MÉCANIQUE (II) And then there was the radio, our constant companion. Winter came on, scratchy with stars, and we cut a memorial garden from a piece of silver paper.

Egyptian birds, a lacelike tangle of root.

While the haut-parleurs scoffed in the parlor, we changed our shoes to climb the chainlink fence.

So many berries close to the ground!

I was looking for the lost swimming pool when the steam began to rise.

Waiting all night for the body to rise again, I hid my answers in upturned paper cups.

The rain fell and we measured its inches.

Our lungs, pink machines operated in the inner darkness.

We wanted what we had, but realer.

I asked the house, Who do you think you are? but could find no sufficient answer. A thickening of air.

To touch the body of the air, you must keep still as sleep in the bus depot.

You must allow the air to come toward you in gentleness, a shy but tame thing.

66

Light beams on the street from erstwhile trees, grown straight and tarry in a distant wood.

The missionaries are digging in the staked-out floodplains.

The life outside the body is the only life.

67

BALLET MÉCANIQUE (III) Why not this night? Continuous in that in-between falls away upon arrival.

Scrambling down a hillside, I turned sideways toward the lost swimming pool, the public lawn.

I turned the crank, kept my hand steady.

There may have been love, but it masqueraded as a pear tree vaguely visible on the western horizon.

The haut-parleurs laughed their crushed bone laughs.

I blew the punchline in the joke about the lost elephant and the space/time continuum.

The missionaries lost interest in our bodies, their slowly weathered delights.

Locked in the parlor, we traded clothes, unlocked the word-hoard. We wanted to be proud of each other, but the rain got in the way. It soaked through the wool while we carved a memorial garden of deer bone, a hundred tiny willows.

The problem with your life is that you don’t believe it’s yours. So said the house, the cool pocket of air. Our bodies thickening, pulled down towards the earth. We went for walks down Seventh Avenue, and the sidewalk threw back heat.

68

I asked the machines, Who do you think you are, watching from above without reference to the human. Bound together by a common discontent: these foolish skins, so prone to piercing. It wasn’t, exactly, death that we feared, though the radio had other ideas, always asking us to dance.

I said to the radio, This body is a longing bounded by time.

A road kept tunneling through August, blind between the high corn.

We kept walking down it, calling our names up to the oranged night sky.

69

NEVERAGAINLAND This is the end of history, where the sun went to bed.

A sinister woodcut of a dragon floats away without reference to politics, culture, or history.

Here, a prize-winning pear is all within bounds, with a tangled patch of brambles, or an awkwardly splayed nude.

There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, a strange amplification of the miraculous.

(After my decease, we’ll evacuate to the moon.)

70

June 27, 2005

STRANGE REPORTS

i.

On the one hand, explanation. On the other, horror. We entered the subterranean world through a rent in the oak tree.

Night’s insistent preening. An emphatic expletive of indefinite meaning.

ii. {pretty pretty pretty pretty quick quick quick}

iii.

If both beekeepers and brides wear veils, how to tell them apart? An incision in the pistil, fiction in the auction. Desire

& the problems of desire. A certain slippage toward dusk.

71

iv.

Comprehensive & wanting to govern. Can exorbitance exist without gravitation, orbit?

If sleep is a pitcher that fills and empties, you rise always into language, gritty from being born.

72

CINEMA MUTO the mendicant began to ascend like a starving bird, tongue-tied and sweating extract the fetus he can become someone completely different than who he was.

October 9, 2006

73

PROPAGANDA SUITE (II) iii: Chairman Mao and Us Know Each Other Forever Dear Chairman, do you like me? Check a box:

[ ] yes

[ ] no

[ ] maybe I am waltzing with a thousand cherry blossoms. It’s a festival!

The Ship of State is stuck in dry dock.

I sing popular songs at night to its shrinkwrapped hull.

I go to sleep holding your hand very tightly.

Someone smashed my husband’s dog head, dressed him in a suit of sad progress. Pinstriped, even.

Chairman, are your deserts advancing towards me?

Just because you’re waiting patiently doesn’t mean everything will be fine.

You throw coins over the house and then they make a television show about it: here’s where my mother comes in cleaning everything in sight.

74

iv: Do Not Forget Who Dug the Well, Miss Chairman Mao

All the Time Chairman, my chairman, I like to say your title to myself when you are far from me.

I covered the hillside in sad chalk scrapings: lonely pony, bends for a hopscotch stone.

I address the crowd in the high style of character assassins. They don’t/won’t hear me over the fireworks. The dancing lion pirouettes!

The street’s a river money flows down!

At the Parade of Brightly Colored Flags, how the drum rumbles my ribcage and gut.

Peasants wave grotesquely, white-gloved like ghosts. They grind cigarette stubs unlit on their teeth. Oh little marble, little porcelain fist, steel-toed one. Little hammer and sickle cell, I whisper this to you: at night I’ll lay my head down on a little red book to dream.

75

DEAR

,

By the time I finished writing, you had disappeared inside me. An absence bounded by the imagined shape of your skin. The body only token of the thought that creates it, yet I counted years by those touches, bruised moments of light. Plankton sparking in the suffocating cold. I opened the ocean’s windows against the lateness of night up there, looking for phosphorescence dripped from the season. I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. Your absence a set of coordinates marked on a brittle map. X receding pleasantly ahead. My moral compass skittered. Somewhere over Canada (O Canada, more Joni Mitchell than anthem) the swish of water clockwise toward magnetic north. To drive all night again, and to love everything.

76

TELLING STORIES WITH THE ANGEL OF DEATH Houses and silos alone too long have a way of turning back into trees.

Squat by a field’s edge.

Make yourself a road winding clear to Talbot County.

Make yourself a bony oak; strain your arms at hawk that live off deer and fox.

Your eyes are stolen from an eagle. Your eyes are stolen from an owl.

Stars are white corn stubble.

Last winter you fell in love with one red field where soy was left to winter. Making your mouth a round word. Auburn.

Other words in February clink, sharp. Bitter.

Dim. You‘ve built your house of words like these. Out in

77

the yard, a hum of auburn; a radio tuned neither to one station nor quite to another.

78

DEAR OLD ALEX, I WILL REmember this for you. a congeries of holes in the sky like a black daytime, a bronze honeycomb where the bones had already been licked clean. the end product of an analytic sequence, the laid-out skeletons in their crusts of burlap crawl inside the nose and mouth of the Devil himself, like teeth winking through the bitter fog of their cigarettes They had called in the county sheriff and his men to observe from a treetop mirador.

I shooed them away, opening his chest to reveal massed rhododendrons, the fallibility of the abattoir

June 18 & 25, 2001

79

1518 SPRUCE PLACE Using beauty to tear a hole in space & then you enter through it. Using your body to tear a hole in time. Using your body as a well, a place we might fall until we hit dark waters. Using darkness as a veil behind which words twist, supple. Twisting your body sideways to enter beauty through a tear. Tear as in rend, not weep. Weep as in your body giving itself over to exhaustion. The small thrashes entering sleep. Small thrushes in the vines, harbingering. As though the spring were a malingerer. As though night would enter the apartment through the open window. As though a window opened in beauty, and through it, a breeze.

80

NOTES p. 15. “Epistolary” is for Erin Lyndal Martin. p. 16, 20, 24, 29, 61, 68, 71, 77. Each collage poem was composed with text and imagery from the issue of the New Yorker whose date appears in the lower right-hand corner. p. 17. The final stanza of “I bring a dowry of conflagration.” contains imagery from “The House in the Middle,” a short film made by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau in 1954 and anthologized in Wholphin No. 1. p. 18-19, 72-73. The titles of these poems are taken from English translations of Maoist propaganda posters, as is the phrase “the Motherland’s rivers are all covered in red.” p. 21. The title of “Bird, how beautifully you sing!” is a refrain from the Grimm Brothers’ story, “The Juniper Tree,” as translated by Jack Zipes in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Bantam, 1992). p. 25-28. “[four short plays]” is for Deborah Stein. p. 31-57. “Residential, as in” was partially inspired by the work of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio architecture program in Hale County, Alabama. p. 45 includes a line from Doc Pomus’s “Lonely Avenue,” as recorded by Ray Charles in 1956. p. 59, 62-67. “Ballet Mécanique” references Fernand Leger, Dudley Murphy, and Man Ray’s 1924 film of the same name. The word “hautparleurs” is taken from the explanatory text that begins some versions of the film—though the word translates as “loudspeakers,” I originally 83

imagined a second meaning, from my literal translation of the two words: “high-talkers.” p. 56. “Telling stories with the angel of death” is for Janice Gallagher. p. 58. “1518 Spruce Place” is for Jeff Peterson.

84

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the editors of the following publications, where poems from this book have previously appeared or are forthcoming: Platte Valley Review, H_NGM_N, Colorado Review, Fairy Tale Review, Santa Clara Review, Fourteen Hills, The Philadelphia Independent, Slant, 42opus, and 751 Magazine.

“The book of glories” was published in Poems + Prints, an artist book project by printmaker Laura Brown in the summer of 2010.

“Residential, as in” was published as an e-chapbook by Blue Hour Press in 2009.

This book owes a great debt to the sensitive readings and astute advice of Erin Lyndal Martin, Jennifer Gandel Ridgeway, Robin Behn, and Deborah Stein; also to the support and friendship of all the above plus the Hylands, the Bonaccis, and the extended Alabama/Minnesota/East Coast/poetry family (understanding “poetry,” in this case, as a separate and magical country, in which I am honored to make a home). Special thanks to all at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where many of these poems first took shape. I am unable to imagine a place where the virtues of kindness, community-mindedness, and generosity could better combine with a spirit of inquisitiveness and exploration: y’all are the real deal. Thanks to Farrah and Nate, for reading and poetry-friendship. Big thanks to Matt Ryan for pushing me to get this manuscript together, and to the Lowbrow Press crew for the spirit of shared enterprise. Biggest thanks go to Jeff Peterson, for everything.

85

Author photo by Jeff Peterson. In James Payne’s sculpture, Evening, at Franconia Sculpture Park, MN.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MC Hyland’s chapbooks include Every Night In Magic City (H_NGM_N, 2010), Residential, As In (Blue Hour Press, 2009) and (with Kate Lorenz and Friedrich Kerksieck) the hesitancies (Small Fires Press, 2006). She lives in Minneapolis, where she runs DoubleCross Press and the Pocket Lab Reading Series, and works as an administrator and occasional letterpress instructor at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

87