divorced busieness partners poetry book on shady terrazzo wall

Poetry

Emily Hyland’s debut collection, Divorced Business Partners, was published by Howling Bird Press in October 2024.

Her second collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, is forthcoming with Cornerstone Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press in 2026.

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.

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 Itasca Books.

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

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