by Erin Malone (Author)
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.