Hyde’s sophomore collection is a moonlit homage to the wonders of Minnesota that investigates the region’s mythos, moods, and storied places using some traditional forms, like the ballad, and diction that hearkens back to Blake and Wordsworth (from “Goose Capital”: “Once honked upon, one wishes // to harvest the honk. My passions // played in the firmament’s fairyland.”) but with contemporary subject matter. These include state highways, a Dinkytown used book store, and the state’s beloved roadside attractions, like “Big Tom, the world’s largest // turkey statue,” in whose size and story Hyde finds much broader resonance. Fable-like and anecdotal prose poems also feature in Hyde’s collection, particularly in “Part IV: Family and Faith,” which features poems, like “Bible Understudy (Luke 23: 42-43)” that grapple with the complexities of speech and silence within the Lutheran faith.

The structure of Hyde’s collection is a series of landscapes at times physical and elsewhere metaphysical, spiritual, psychological, and mythological, often overlapping and in relationship to one another. “Maps sketch a wish, a fancy, a hope, // to corral all the space you can rope,” Hyde writes in “Minnesota Maps,” effectively transforming cartography into myth that serves the mission of private property. Meanwhile, in “Part III: Inner Outposts,” poems like “Brain River” and “Guard Dog,” illustrate the speaker’s cerebral geography: “it vandalized my frontal lobe, // inciting Matters Gray. // With narcissism’s harpsichord, // the beast began to play.”

Like maps, poetry also offers a tangible connection between the self and nature, and Hyde’s poems seek to chart that bridge or boundary, like the epic “Into the Woods”, wherein the forest encroaches on the speaker’s home and transports him “in Time” to “erstwhile Minnesota”. There, the speaker realizes “the woods pose in randomness. // So do the machinations of men. // I fancy God placed the trees in forests as a model to guide // the conduct of Man’s social order.” Abundant with tall tales, rich insights, and surprising metaphors, Hyde’s collection is a deeply felt consideration of Minnesota landscapes, places, and ways of being and believing.

Takeaway: Poetic tribute to Minnesota, rich in imagery and philosophical searching.

Comparable Titles: Campbell McGrath; Jane Hufford Downes’s Birds of the Midwest.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A