SITE OF DISAPPEARANCE by Erin Malone
SKU:
978-1-942723-16-5
$18.00
$18.00
per item
published October 2023
perfect bound trade paperback
9 x 6 inches, 78 pages
ISBN 978-1-942723-16-5
Press Release:
site_of_disappearance_downloadable_press_release.pdf
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In her second full-length poetry collection Site of Disappearance, Erin Malone’s spare and resonant lyrics confront the silence that followed her 11-year-old brother’s death. Decades later, as her own son approaches this age, she finds herself returning to her childhood landscape, remembering for the first time in years the abductions and murders of two boys that shook her small town that same season. Through archival research and with tenderness and precision, she steps carefully through the wreckage left by tragedy, in which brother/ boy/ son blur and revolve, and “time stands still because it has a body.” Site of Disappearance is an intimate reckoning with personal and collective grief guided by an acute awareness of language’s power to reveal and transform.
Praise for SITE OF DISAPPEARANCE
Malone’s artistic precision and care hone this collection into a dazzling document of profound beholding—“Everything I’m afraid of, I’m about to name.” Delicately wrought and clearly called forth, the poems in Site of Disappearance draft a memory palace mapped by dint of the speaker’s keen devotion and clarity of observation.
—Laura Da’, author of Instruments of the True Measure
Out of the exquisitely-crafted poems in Site of Disappearance, Erin Malone has created both a page-turning mystery and a masterful investigation of memory, where symbol and metaphor merge with facts. The poems bend and stretch time and borrow breath and silence from white space. They quietly command you to keep reading. This is a haunting, irresistible, utterly beautiful book.
—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume
Written with great authority, evident by the allegiance throughout to precise diction and image, these poems are in deep and complex conversation with each other, resulting in a complicated, multi-dimensional work of beauty and terror, light and darkness. This will be a work, we learn from the first piece, that focuses in, in, in, deeply, darkly, and with grace.
—Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall
Sometimes the muse makes a big ask. Revisit the death of a brother, for example, and explore how that painful
memory gathers momentum as one’s own son comes of age. Muses, Erin Malone knows, are expert button pushers.
—Matt Sutherland, “Site of Disappearance,” Foreword Reviews, November / December 2023
Malone’s second poetry collection, Site of Disappearance (with its haunting cover art by Ryan Molenkamp) touches on so many things that disappear. A brother. A paper boy. A season. Innocence. Security. Memory. The opening poem, “Biography,” centers her brother in a story where a townful of people will also figure. But even in this centering, the poet foreshadows other, darker images to come: “my brother was born blue / and quiet / not unlike the sky and like the sky he lived / exposed” and “he lived / for eleven years he lived / and then /”. . . . Site of Disappearance is a striking and memorable work of art I will return to many times.
—Jonathan Everitt, “Two Graves, One Terrible Date,” MicroLit Almanac, November 20, 2023
These poems are about Malone’s brother, who died at eleven; two abducted and murdered boys in her small town that same summer; and her own son, now approaching the age of those lost boys. The poems about Malone’s son are a relief and a comfort amongst the ones about death and loss. A non-linear ordering of the poems allows for convolutions of memory: the poems address the past in new ways as the present unfolds. As Malone’s son does regular, living-boy things, she re-remembers and re-understands her memories of her brother and the town tragedies.
Poems often concern themselves with pain and grief, and no matter how well it’s done, honestly, I usually find such poems a big bore. These are different. They don’t dwell only in sadness; they allow the reader time to breathe. “Archive,” the long poem that begins section IV of the book, is more white space than text, like a bright haunted house with windows open to the breeze. In it, the body of one of the missing boys is discovered:
Where the field assumed
A shape
The searchers found
Their answer [p.52]
—Jessy Randall, “Site of Disappearance by Erin Malone,” Mom Egg Review, April 8, 2024
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance with Cate Gable of the Chinook Observer in an interview titled, Erin Malone: poet among us, Nov 14, 2023
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance on Han VanderHart's Of Poetry Podcast in an in-depth conversation titled, Erin Malone (of Bears, Memory, and Doors), December 27, 2023
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance with Gabriela Denise Frank writing for Crab Creek Review in an interview titled, A Conversation with Erin Malone, January 1, 2024
Praise for SITE OF DISAPPEARANCE
Malone’s artistic precision and care hone this collection into a dazzling document of profound beholding—“Everything I’m afraid of, I’m about to name.” Delicately wrought and clearly called forth, the poems in Site of Disappearance draft a memory palace mapped by dint of the speaker’s keen devotion and clarity of observation.
—Laura Da’, author of Instruments of the True Measure
Out of the exquisitely-crafted poems in Site of Disappearance, Erin Malone has created both a page-turning mystery and a masterful investigation of memory, where symbol and metaphor merge with facts. The poems bend and stretch time and borrow breath and silence from white space. They quietly command you to keep reading. This is a haunting, irresistible, utterly beautiful book.
—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume
Written with great authority, evident by the allegiance throughout to precise diction and image, these poems are in deep and complex conversation with each other, resulting in a complicated, multi-dimensional work of beauty and terror, light and darkness. This will be a work, we learn from the first piece, that focuses in, in, in, deeply, darkly, and with grace.
—Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall
Sometimes the muse makes a big ask. Revisit the death of a brother, for example, and explore how that painful
memory gathers momentum as one’s own son comes of age. Muses, Erin Malone knows, are expert button pushers.
—Matt Sutherland, “Site of Disappearance,” Foreword Reviews, November / December 2023
Malone’s second poetry collection, Site of Disappearance (with its haunting cover art by Ryan Molenkamp) touches on so many things that disappear. A brother. A paper boy. A season. Innocence. Security. Memory. The opening poem, “Biography,” centers her brother in a story where a townful of people will also figure. But even in this centering, the poet foreshadows other, darker images to come: “my brother was born blue / and quiet / not unlike the sky and like the sky he lived / exposed” and “he lived / for eleven years he lived / and then /”. . . . Site of Disappearance is a striking and memorable work of art I will return to many times.
—Jonathan Everitt, “Two Graves, One Terrible Date,” MicroLit Almanac, November 20, 2023
These poems are about Malone’s brother, who died at eleven; two abducted and murdered boys in her small town that same summer; and her own son, now approaching the age of those lost boys. The poems about Malone’s son are a relief and a comfort amongst the ones about death and loss. A non-linear ordering of the poems allows for convolutions of memory: the poems address the past in new ways as the present unfolds. As Malone’s son does regular, living-boy things, she re-remembers and re-understands her memories of her brother and the town tragedies.
Poems often concern themselves with pain and grief, and no matter how well it’s done, honestly, I usually find such poems a big bore. These are different. They don’t dwell only in sadness; they allow the reader time to breathe. “Archive,” the long poem that begins section IV of the book, is more white space than text, like a bright haunted house with windows open to the breeze. In it, the body of one of the missing boys is discovered:
Where the field assumed
A shape
The searchers found
Their answer [p.52]
—Jessy Randall, “Site of Disappearance by Erin Malone,” Mom Egg Review, April 8, 2024
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance with Cate Gable of the Chinook Observer in an interview titled, Erin Malone: poet among us, Nov 14, 2023
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance on Han VanderHart's Of Poetry Podcast in an in-depth conversation titled, Erin Malone (of Bears, Memory, and Doors), December 27, 2023
Erin Malone discusses Site of Disappearance with Gabriela Denise Frank writing for Crab Creek Review in an interview titled, A Conversation with Erin Malone, January 1, 2024