PETER B. HYLAND is the author of the chapbook Elegy to the Idea of a Child (Trilobite Press, 2009). He holds a BFA in drawing and painting from the University of North Texas, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He is a director of development at the Menil Collection in Houston.


“Peter Hyland’s poems are both elegantly wrought and meditatively wild. They testify to an original, restless intelligence. He can cast his imagination into a woman’s dress, the mind of a grasshopper, or into the glass eyeballs of a buffalo head mounted on the wall of a home in suburban Texas to contemplate ‘man’s tireless ingenuity.’ These are intense poems of great artfulness, and they make the central questions urgent and relevant again.”—Tony Hoagland

“Peter B. Hyland’s poems situate the inner life—desire, the longing to change, the thirst for love and company—firmly in the bewildering swarm of American life now. How does he manage to write such elegant and shapely lyrics and still include the ‘schizophrenic blizzard’ of scrambled cable TV signals, the all-night fire of oil refineries, kids getting high to Nirvana, the J. Crew catalogue? Out Loud is assured and thoroughly engaging; these are witty, sexy, smart and aching poems by a passionately alert citizen of our moment.”—Mark Doty