Review by Jessy Randall
I first encountered the work of Erin Malone when I was on a badly-managed, amateurish, truly terrible three-person judging panel for a chapbook contest that no longer exists. Malone’s manuscript was, in my opinion, the clear winner. I thought the judges’ meeting would be quick and decisive. Well, it wasn’t. I was the only person who brought written notes to the meeting; the other two judges (let’s call them A and B) relied upon their memories. I now suspect that judge A confused Malone’s manuscript with another, and that judge B, through a lack of organization, hadn’t read it at all.
That particular judging panel was destined for disaster from the moment it convened. In our panel, the winner was everyone’s second choice, because the first choices didn’t match – not through our slapdash process, and perhaps not even if we’d been more seasoned judges. A manuscript a panel like that can agree on is unlikely to be super weird or innovative or wild. It’s a circular definition: something everyone could agree on was … something everyone could agree on. Guess what our three-white-women panel was able to agree was a decent book? A book by a white man. Surprise! What was his book about? I honestly can’t remember. The book was okay. It wouldn’t embarrass anyone.
Since that contest, two decades ago, I’ve followed Malone’s career with great interest. I felt vindicated when Janet Norman Knox chose the chapbook I loved, What Sound Does It Make, for Concrete Wolf in 2007. In 2013, Ralph Angel chose her full-length collection, Hover, as the winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. Her new book is Site of Disappearance (Ornithopter, October 2023), and it’s, as the kids say, fire.
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]
Even the happier poems about the living boy, Malone’s son, are haunted:
Only Child
six pairs
of his cast
off shoes
crowd the
doorway
as if
I had
six sons
to greet me [p.66]
It’s a tricky balancing act, writing about one’s love for one’s children without dissolving into sugary sludge, but Malone has found a way in: the poignancy of everyday chores, the awareness that an eleven year old won’t stay eleven, if you’re lucky.
A few pages after “Archive,” in “His Sentence,” Malone’s intense empathy extends to the town boys’ murderer, who says in his last interview
All of the doors
are being closed
behind me. [p.58]
In her book Reader, Come Home, a follow-up to Proust and the Squid, literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf references the term “quiet eye,” used by Wordsworth and John S. Dunne, and employs it to describe the “quality of attention” necessary for deep reading – the opposite of the distracted mind that “darts from a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another.” This is the kind of attention Malone’s book inspires.
Site of Disappearance by Erin Malone
Ornithopter Press, October 2023, $18.00 (paper)
ISBN 1942723165
Jessy Randall’s poems, comics, and other things have appeared in McSweeney’s, Mom Egg Review, Poetry, and Women’s Review of Books. Her most recent poetry collection is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.