THE END

by M.C. Hyland

Poetry. Women's Studies. Composed between April 2013 and February 2017, the poems in MC Hyland's THE END, each titled "THE END," chronicle a time of late capitalist crisis, as a populace alights on, endures, and absorbs turbulent change. Hyland's project, launched as an ironic formal conceit, evolves on the page into a witness account of the ways that the personal and private brush against and dissolve into collective being--in protest, through social media, on a crowded subway car rattling into darkness. A diarist lyric for the Occupy, #MeToo, and Twitter era, THE END captures in crisp, intimate flashes an extended moment in which the personal becomes inherently political, and the daily musings and observations of a mind navigating these times cannot help but be inflected by a collective preoccupation with a felt sense of futurity's impending end.

"Hers is a kind of feminist-Wordsworthian project for our moment, without Wordsworthian lapses of condescension. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to think of Hyland in THE END as a Baudelaireian flâ alert, occasionally dyspeptic, sensitive, registering the discontents of life in the 21st C. metropolis--as a woman, a citizen, a thinker, a listener, a friend, a racialized subject, an embodied self."--Maureen McLane

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

Published June 4, 2019

Reviews

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is teeming with a kind of stripped down lyric voice in a prose poem format: no broad strokes, no catering to an idea explicitly, just setting down each sentence to be a straw in a nest. The ends of each piece (spoiler alert; they are all titled "The End") serves as a shallow dish for that page's words to rest on, but unity or coherence is radial, flattened out. Sometimes my brain wants to start reading the poems as if they are from Hejinian's My Life, but with adjustments for interior, surreal, exterior, simply and thrillingly building a world of meaning out of whatever is at hand. The pivot you might make usually make as the reader has been flustered, but the locus here is about duties, being a woman, trying to take refuge and survive. What can feel like a difficult read at first, then feels a deconstructed riff, not meant to "reward." It invites in and in, the house on the cover shows you what you might be in for, that the subjective and constantly raining Actual frustrates the "production" of meaning and the disfiguring productivity of capitalism.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really brilliant look at all the ways we live.
I love prose poems, and these could all be called that. I'm probably being very stupid about that, I'm sure there's lots I'm missing, but the sampling and the little bits of wisdom, and the little snarky bits, they all add up to a lovely look at what we call life.
Some pieces are more poignant, and some veer towards anger, but they are all measured and relatable. It all resonates.
MC is a fabulous poet.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely tremendous book. Hyland takes in the world and its voices in order to assemble poems that are part Duchampian assemblage, part Burroughs cut-up, part Agnes Martin horizons, and inevitably our own readings and existence. Magnificent.

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I believed the men I loved wished like me to have and to be nothing.”