BOOKS

Emily Hyland’s newest collection of poetry, My Wise Little Ghost, is forthcoming with Trio House Press in July 2026. You can preorder the collection now.

Hyland is the author of Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story (Howling Bird Press, 2024) & Emily: The Cookbook, (Ballantine Books, 2018).

Her third collection, BREASTS, will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2027.

Praise for My Wise Little Ghost

  • — David Keplinger, author of Ice

    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.

  • — Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

    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.

Recent Publications

  • My Wise Little Ghost

    My Wise Little Ghost

    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.

    Preorder the Book
  • Divorced Business Partners

    Divorced Business Partners

    Covering themes of love, loss, vulnerability and partnership, Hyland’s debut collection of poetry follows spouses as they take on a business venture and open a restaurant. The little business quickly becomes successful, and their marriage collapses in the process. Before they know it, husband and wife are nothing more than divorced business partners.

    As Mark Doty describes, "In sharply drawn scenes – tender, aching, brutal and comic almost all at once -- Hyland creates a kind of documentary sequence, a portrait of people trying their best to love and to work. As richly dimensional as a novel, Divorced Business Partners is bracingly contemporary and thoroughly alive.”

    Buy the Collection

  • EMILY: The Cookbook

    Named one of the best cookbooks by Food Network and The New York Times, this irresistible debut cookbook shares delicious and doable recipes — no wood-fired oven or fancy equipment required.

    You’ll be shown how to re-create such crowd-pleasing favorites as the famous round pizza, the iconic Detroit pan pizza, and the legendary EMMY Burger, the juicy wonder that tops many New York City “Best Burger” lists.

    Grab the Cookbook

DIVORCED BUSINESS PARTNERS

Covering themes of love, loss, vulnerability and partnership, Emily’s debut collection of poetry is a nuanced read. Described as “a collection for the broken hearted & heart-healed” by José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold and Citizen Illegal, the rich storytelling will reach you wherever you are.

Divorced Business Partners is now available for order via EmilyHyland.com and Itasca Books.

Order the book

Praise for Divorced Business Partners

  • — Délana Dameron, author of Redwood Court & How God Ends Us

    Divorced Business Partners is an ambitious poetic debut. Hyland covers a universe of emotional ground—one that announces itself in the tradition of Plath, Sexton, and Olds—inviting the reader into the interior of a failing marriage and a breaking heart as it journeys towards healing. The language is precise and sharp. Her work spirits us straight to the red hot center. We emerge triumphant

  • — José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold and Citizen Illegal

    Emily Hyland’s Divorced Business Partners knows how to make a wound sing and how to bruise the blush of fresh flowers. I’m saying this is a collection for the broken hearted & heart-healed to carry next to Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, and bell hooks. It is too diminishing to call these poems divorce poems: they are life poems: they live and breathe and delight—even through the hurt.

  • — Mark Doty, author of What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

    Emily Hyland’s inventive debut is a frank chronicle of one couple coming together and apart as they struggle through the high-stress adventure of launching a restaurant. In sharply drawn scenes—tender, aching, brutal and comic almost all at once—Hyland creates a kind of documentary sequence, a portrait of people trying their best to love and to work. As richly dimensional as a novel, Divorced Business Partners is bracingly contemporary and thoroughly alive.

  • — Genine Lentine, author of Poses

    In Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story, Emily Hyland takes as her subject the nuanced particulars of how something comes apart while holding together. The title itself is charged with alignments and oppositions. This book is an unstinting study of intimacy, what it is to know someone, what it is to be known. Hyland's formal alertness, her attunement to sound and rhythm, and the contours of her steady attention are among the many pleasures of this book. At the heart of these poems is also the concept of work, of collaboration–of laboring together to make something that wasn’t there before, a place for people to gather. As I read this collection, it strikes me that a poem is also a gathering place, a locus where we can return and return, and each time, find something new to surprise and sustain us.

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses — past the headlands —
Into deep Eternity —

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand,
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

— Emily Dickinson

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS