Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story

"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."

--Mark Doty, author of What is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My Life

"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."

--D?lana Dameron, author of How God Ends Us

"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."

--Genine Lentine, author of Archaeopteryx