Wrecks - Paperback

by Erin L. McCoy (Author)

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.