In My Wise Little Ghost, Hyland's latent grief over her abortion from many years ago is activated by her sister's pregnancy. Week by week, as she learns all about how her niece develops in utero, Hyland uncovers the texture of buried, complicated feelings from the impossible timing and circumstance of the end of her marriage that led to the choice she made. As she tracks memory and experience on deep psychedelic therapy journeys, the unexpected arises: "who-would've-been-Daisy" finds voice and narrates the story from somewhere off in the cosmos, in conversation with Hyland, as each speaker works through what happened and touches into who they are-and aren't-as a result of Hyland's abortion.

Emily Hyland's debut collection, Divorced Business Partners, was published by Howling Bird Press in October 2024. Emily Hyland's second collection of poetry, My Wise Little Ghost, releases in July of 2026. Her next collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, will be published with Cornerstone Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, in March 2027. 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. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza.