Every Night in Magic City is cinematic in a way that answers MC Hyland’s interest in films like Fernand Leger and Dudley Mitchell’s Ballet Mécanique—and, in her great humility, the poet does not approach as a projectionist; rather, she attempts to step back out of her desire to be “a vehicle for light” (7): “a woman becomes a curtain & light moves through her as she moves” (“The Split-Faced Man Cannot be Touched” 17).

Hyland’s poems are dreamy even as they chasten us to wakefulness. As Every Night in Magic City attends to the currents of film and water (both mediums of light) it is increasingly evident that currents both obscure and sharpen our sense of what is at stake in them. Clarities reveal the murky ecstasy of living in the world, arriving like “a lizard’s submerged eye [that] drifts woozily upward” (“Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting Leaves” 7) and the lens is often “Vaseline-smeared” (“& Then Allowed to Climb” 12). Which is to say, these are poems that are deeply invested in the convulsiveness of the real and in the consideration of shifts of human awareness.

Every Night in Magic City is also incredibly warm and full of genuine kindness. Hyland’s attention always gives precedence to the greater activity of circumstances: “You held/ my hand as we ran to see all these things” (“The Pinned Coat Arm of the One-Handed Man” 8). Conscientious of the poet’s position as thief (as framing arrests activity by stealing moments away from the totality), she picks pockets lovingly like Charlie Chaplin (as her pockets are being picked): “I am picking your pocket with extraordinary affection” (“Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting Leaves” 7). There is always the sense that the poet is abandoned to the poetry: “dear mister almighty I speak/ by a telephone out of the passing parade” (“The Split-Faced Man Cannot Be Touched” 16). This is also apparent as the wear of experience gives way to process: “aged by sun exposing the film” (16), and the poet is left “Sliding along the street where my hands/ come to rest” (“Caught Around the Dark Submersions” 23).

Recognizing their own temporality, the poems of Every Night in Magic City awaken to a realization that “The Law Always Speaks in Unison” (24). Their organization comes from elsewhere, goes elsewhere. The facts that Hyland attends to are written across the body like “So Many Forms of Superimposed Transport” (18). As “these words shifting upward” move across the screen (18), they score a transcendence “rising through the funeral veil into a kind of viscous light” (“Caught Around the Dark Submersions” 23).

In this sense, Every Night in Magic City serves as an important reminder of Rimbaud’s assertion that departures are always arrivals, and Hyland’s poems are truly departures that arrive “re-entering where we have always been” only to find it new (“The Split-Faced Man Cannot be Touched” 17). “Chaque Soir à Magic-City” enacts this transformation: “made of light where we remove/ our clothes & adieu/ so beautiful!” (13). It in no coincidence that this adieu comes such close proximity to “arrival” (13). Looking back we see that the edge have departed from in “Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting of Leaves” has changed, shifted: “Bursting stars at the shifting edge” (“Even the Face Unmoving” 21).

One more thing, it is a good book that ends by acknowledging that there is, finally, no one to drive the car; it is a testimony of refreshing innocence: “the steering wheel comes/ loose// & then the body of the car descends from a ceiling into the room full of schoolgirls” (“The Law Always Speaks in Unison” 24). Read MC Hyland’s Every Night in Magic City soon as you get the chance. You’ll be glad you did.