Wrecks

Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs. Wrecks investigates how the human-nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence--against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is--and what is not--human. It engages the author's experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.

Erin L. McCoy's poetry collection, Wrecks, was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Narrative, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Seventh Wave, and other publications. Her work has appeared in the Best New Poets anthology twice, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review's 2021 Miller Audio Prize. She won second place in the 2019-2020 Rougarou Poetry Contest, judged by CAConrad, and she is the recipient of an Oakley Hall III Memorial Scholarship to attend the Community of Writers. Erin is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative, a proofreader at Penguin Random House, and acquisitions editor for Entre Ríos Books. She holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Washington. She is from Louisville, Kentucky. Her website is erinlmccoy.com.