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.
