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.

Born in New Mexico and raised in Nebraska and Colorado, Erin Malone is the author of two full-length collections: Site of Disappearance, finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Hover, as well as a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make. Recent honors include the Coniston Prize and the Robert Creeley Memorial Prize, and residency support from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Anderson Center, Ucross and Jentel Foundations. The recipient of grants and fellowships from Artist Trust, 4Culture, Jack Straw, and the Colorado Council on the Arts, Erin formerly taught in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, served as Editor of Poetry Northwest, and now works as a bookseller. She lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington State.

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee, who writes into diasporic living. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools. Dear Memphis is Edelman’s first book.

River River Books announces the release of Dear Memphis, the anticipated first book from teacher and poet Rachel Edelman. The poems in this stunning collection are addressed to Memphis, Tennessee, the city where the poet grew up, and explore essential questions of belonging, identity, and generational legacies for a Jewish family living in the American South. “What do I know about exile?” one poem’s speaker asks, and by the end of this book the reader will know plenty. These poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, city documents, visual art, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.

Jessica E. Johnson is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the forthcoming memoir Mettlework (Acre Books). She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.