Description:
In My Wise Little Ghost, Hyland's latent grief over her abortion from many years ago is activated by her sister's pregnancy. Week by week, as she learns all about how her niece develops in utero, Hyland uncovers the texture of buried, complicated feelings from the impossible timing and circumstance of the end of her marriage that led to the choice she made. As she tracks memory and experience on deep psychedelic therapy journeys, the unexpected arises: "who-would've-been-Daisy" finds voice and narrates the story from somewhere off in the cosmos, in conversation with Hyland, as each speaker works through what happened and touches into who they are-and aren't-as a result of Hyland's abortion.
Brief description: Emily Hyland's debut collection, Divorced Business Partners, was published by Howling Bird Press in October 2024. Emily Hyland's second collection of poetry, My Wise Little Ghost, releases in July of 2026. Her next collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, will be published with Cornerstone Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, in March 2027. Hyland's poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza.
Review Quotes:
Not since I first read Louise Glück's The Wild Iris have I experienced the holding of voices-the gathering of lives into the body of one book-with the finesse and intensity that I discover now in Emily Hyland's dynamic, garishly honest, and masterful new work, My Wise Little Ghost. While there are hauntings here, real ghosts who speak truth from thin places, this collection is, all the more, one about attraction and inevitable reunion, a book of gatherings-together. Memory clumps like cells around a time and place; presence and the present step forward out of memory; then in middle life the realized self passes through its narrows into community, forgiveness, and unabashed sight. Formally, the organization of voices is brilliant. An elegant reverse prosody stages the dead's soliloquies. At the center of this magnetizing, this swaddling, this bundling together, is the force of poetry, an agent of empowerment and connection that honors life wisely lived-which is in the giving away-sung to the stories of the ancestors, parents and partners, and the guardians we must sometimes become for ourselves.
-David Keplinger, author of Ice
These poems make vivid the wrenching decision to end a pregnancy and lose the person who might have been born. In a feat of imagination, we are allowed to hear the voice of that "little ghost," poignant, witty, and, indeed, "wise." A touching, multi-faceted, collection that reminds us that every inhale, as every exhale is a reach/to connect through the ancestral chords of the whole.
-Ellen Bass, author of Indigo