Poet Erin Malone is celebrating the publication of a new book of poetry, Site of Disappearance, a brilliant poetic exploration of violence and memory.

My brother was born blue / and quiet / not unlike the sky

and like the sky he lived / for eleven years he lived / and then

—Erin Malone, excerpt from the poem “Biography”

Stories

Do stories trap us into neat narratives that oversimplify reality, that create order where disorder and contradiction are a truer version of the occurrence? As Parul Sehgal wrote in a recent New York Times article, “We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative is also a cage?” (tinyurl.com/4czja7z9)

A good friend and I had a conversation on this topic the other day because I said, “In America we don’t have any cultural ceremonies appropriate for grieving and we need to grieve now — for the wars and the suffering happening all over our globe. For the Israeli hostages; for the Gazans who can’t get medical care or food or water; for all the species — members of our own family after all — that we’re killing in our disregard for the earth; for the young people who can’t find their way.”

And she said, “Why do you think we need to make everything into a story? When I look to nature I don’t see stories, I don’t see grief, I don’t see right or wrong. I see everything existing in furtherance. Nature is not grieving; she is going forward with what is provided, as she always has.” So what if words and their stories are faulty, provide only a container that leaves too much out? Then I say, “Poets — rise up!”

What is poetry for?

Perhaps this is why poetry is important. Poetry is made of words, certainly, but when certain words gather themselves together there is — I think — a transcendence that can happen, that can suggest, introduce, or bring us back to the sense of something beyond those words. As Carl Jung said, “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”

What is this mythic world and is there a way to get back to it? I think Erin Malone, poet and sometime Oysterville resident with husband Shawn Wong and son Peter, set out to get to the bottom of a what had been a hidden memory-story. She chose to go back in time to explore an event for which she had built no clear narrative. What would she find? Was she brave enough to see?

I first spoke with Erin in 2015 when I was working on my MFA thesis. I was interviewing writers to answer the question, “What is poetry for?” I know that reading and writing poetry is a hybrid adventure. For some of us it’s an occupation. For some a way to soothe. For others — eh? What value can it have in our world of suffering and mayhem? I think poetry — if it’s done well, if it’s authentic, if it amalgamates heart/mind/soul — can lift that veil to Jung’s mythical world where we once lived. That world was a wholeness and we weren’t in it, we weren’t even of it, we were it!

When we last spoke Erin was considering a new project: “It will be an exploration of violence and a memory I unearthed from my own personal history, something that happened in my childhood. Two boys were abducted and murdered in my small town in Nebraska. The first victim was my age, 13, and the second was 12. My brother died at 11 from natural causes — he had heart problems. The first victim was found on the same day my brother died, so they were buried next to each other.” These were disjointed facts that jangled in her memory. She wondered what could be made of them. Now we know — a brilliant book of poetry: “Site of Disappearance” (Ornithopter Press, 2023).

The feeling of what happened

We spoke again last week, so there had been almost eight years between our conversations. As Erin says, “It’s funny it takes so long to get a book done and published!” But eight years or not, “Site of Disappearance” has the same eerie resonance with the current gun violence and domestic terrorism as when she began. “I’m concerned about gun violence. It’s scary,” she says. “At the time I started this project, I wondered what Peter’s life would be like in the future we adults have been preparing for him.”

Pull Quote

She gathered all the bits of it — news from microfiche, conversations with others, police files — and allowed the facts and impressions to flutter in front of her while she examined them. Then she used her skill and poetic craft to fit them together.

“That memory of the murdered boys — I’d nearly forgotten all about that. I’d put all that away somewhere. My family was going through such grief about losing my brother. But I started thinking about it again about the time Peter turned 11. I became interested in the idea that trauma can be inherited in our genes. [There is proof now that trauma is genetically passed down: Scientific American, tinyurl.com/2zer47y8.] So I began working on this project about the danger that kids face and the attraction to danger and the deeper stuff about my brother. I’m witnessing that now with my own son. I’m watching how he presents himself on social media. This murder story was such a hard story to write, but I’m glad it came to the surface. It happened in our small community but we all carry that violence, all of us do.”

Site of disappearance

Erin stepped back in time to begin her project. She returned to the place where her memory was catalyzed and immersed herself in it. She gathered all the bits of it — news from microfiche, conversations with others, police files — and allowed the facts and impressions to flutter in front of her while she examined them. Then she used her skill and poetic craft to fit them together. Not in a narrative exactly — though there is certainly a story present in this book — but in a sequence of smells, sounds, animals, feelings, images: “street lights snapping off,” “the sounds of rubber bands plucked over the folded news,” “birch trees making scraps of themselves,” “lipstick before their mothers get a look,” “bear suit like snowmelt,” “a paper plate abandoned,” “bare ankles in the grass,” “through open windows the clatter of dishes.”

The sum total of this work is an exploration of violence and fear that captures both an adult perspective and the vulnerability of a child. Before he was caught, the murderer prowled the community in a car with his window rolled down. As Erin said, thinking back on that time as a kid, “We knew we were being watched.” The poem “Martial Arts” begins: “At the start of every lesson the teacher / asks, ‘What’s your best defense / in a dark alley?’”

Erin sometimes feels she should apologize for creating such a dark piece of literature when what we might need right now is more light, more hope. (One poem ends, “Mothers / forgive me for opening / these wounds.”) But I said, “The light for me is the language.” Nearly every poem on every page is a masterful manipulation of phrasing, texture, and imagery. The book is evocative, not limiting. Erin opens up her memory, and by means of her emotional research and poetics, she lays it bare for us to inspect and reflect on.

Though I’ve complained about narrative, there is a murder mystery that’s unraveled here — I read the book straight through, like a novella. But what’s compelling about Erin’s writing is not a story that explains, but the magic that happens when words combine to be more than themselves. This exploration is not neat, the story’s not “caged.” There is plenty of spaciousness for contradiction, for misapprehension, for questions to be asked. Do yourself a favor and read some poetry this week. You might start with Erin’s book.

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Erin Malone will be reading from “Site of Disappearance” (and signing books) with a group of local Cascadian poets in January. I’ll keep you posted.