Book Review

Wrecks coils around extinction. The poems in Erin L. McCoy’s debut collection are rooted in the final killing of the great auk, which was a flightless North Atlantic seabird until 1844. But each line arrives with such force—force that radiates from lyrical sharpness and a muscular amount of research—that this book reaches past the container of the 19th Century and hurdles into our timeline, every timeline, looping. And so, by way of extinction, McCoy conjures resurrection, or at least as much as a page—that sheet of dead pulp—allows.

McCoy writes to resurrection by enriching each poem with evidence and clairvoyance. In the preliminary note of the book, McCoy explains that one of the last recorded great auks, who was killed in 1840, was believed to be a witch. Upon finishing Wrecks, I understood the collection to be comprised of sinews, which I view as poems of like material and subject that episodically wind their way through the book. One of these sinews contains poems about the witch-auk, which imagines her first in the afterlife, then her travelling to meet the speaker, then she and speaker move through scene, memory, and future together, hand in hand or flightless wing in flightless wing. These are the collection’s most spellbound poems; they produce lines like “the first thing the auk notices about heaven / is just how thin it is: one aglow tentacle / of a jellyfish stretched between the high cirrus / & plankton-dusted space.” And “this ocean is an ever- / exhaling; bright foam / spits high into the cedars, / & the salt tastes pink / or like bubbles scooping / out a cetacean skull.” At times, Wrecks’s poem-sinews collide, as when Shanawdithit is visited by the witch-auk.

McCoy notes that Shanawdithit “was one of the Beothuk people, who lived in what is now called Newfoundland. The Beothuk traveled to Funk Island in the summers to gather great auks and their eggs for food. Evidence indicates that they may have looked to seabirds as guides to help the dead travel to an island in the west.” Shanawdithit documented hundreds of Beothuk words and made drawings that depict Beothuk culture and lifestyle. A handful of Shanawdithit’s drawings are reproduced in Wrecks, stamped on their own page in their entirety. Is reproduction a resurrection? Before the appearance of one of these drawings, McCoy writes, in “The researcher (2020) dreams of Shanawdithit (1828)”:

. . . I am trying, but I can’t pull you

through the breach, while you—

you saved everyone: drew the shapes of their motion:

carved staffs, a cup

your father held. Here we are now, inside my translations

of your translations—

a rendition of loss, of my failure to render.

Am I fooling myself,

that through so much static, I can almost glimpse:

Perhaps resurrection is a translation of evidence left behind, the poem an attempt to access that which was saved, or a doomed channeling of the savers themselves.

These drawings were produced in the last years of Shanawdithit’s life, when she lived with European colonists once her family members died of tuberculosis, and after the Beothuk people had been systematically genocided for years. A portion of the poems in Wrecks are written after articles, accounts, and memoirs that Europeans wrote while killing their way through auk and human. They are some of the more relentless poems of the book—relentless in their violence and their persona-y positioning, which demands that you meet the poems’ I with yours, the auk’s eye with yours—it’s hazel fact, which was described by Icelandic fishwife Sigríður while preparing twenty-three killed auks in 1831, and which McCoy elaborates upon in “Self-portrait skinning twenty-three auks.”

The poem begins with auk skinning: “a little rasp in its throat whittled the exhaling air. The auk laid down at last / and stayed there, its breath / so quiet I didn’t know when / it gave way to a greater quiet.” This assault begets another scene of assault, which is written so fiercely that I don’t want to butcher it here via paraphrase or quote. Read the poem, and understand that “there is pain at every stage of becoming a woman. Or a woman / is anything used to pain.” Understand that the auk’s membrane which covers her hazel eyes—her protective measure—is akin to the tool that you will use to protect yourself when atrocity is committed on your own body.

This poem exemplifies one of the larger projects of Wrecks: to break down the category of human and nonhuman. At times, McCoy adopts the Freudian concept of the uncanny to do this. These poems are titled “Uncanny valley;” the most sprawling one is centered around an Icelandic sailor named Sigurður who has left a straw doll that resembles himself back home in Iceland with his daughter, in the hopes that she won’t forget him:

But when Sigurdr lifted that last auk by the neck, he saw in its

dangling body the straw doll, which was supposed to resemble

but not be human. The auk was not supposed to resemble but was

resembling him. How it sighed in his fist, once, when it saw what he

was doing. Like a child that tosses back into bad sleep.

The lie of category is a useful tool, one that is used over and over again to justify extinctions, genocides. So McCoy asks: What if we saw into the doll of ourselves, the auk of ourselves, ourselves? Would worlds no longer be destroyed? Would resurrections no longer be needed?

Wrecks bodies these questions in poems that are practical and supernatural, researched and expressive. This collection’s got me believing in the resurrective power of the page, but also in the understanding that a resurrection is always, in part, a promise that you’ll die again. Maybe you’ll come back in your current form, maybe not, but “if you & i / came out not-quite-human, came out / monstrous, i still love the careful way / you nudge a blade of bull kelp / washed ashore in this last world / twisted to the shape of that last world.”