Site of Disappearance

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.

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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. –Matt Sutherland, Foreward Reviews

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

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