Chomping at the Bit: Erin Edinger Reviews Wrecks by Erin McCoy

I vividly remember the first time I heard Erin McCoy speak. I was attending the "Heretic" panel on writing religious trauma at AWP 2024 when McCoy began by naming the physical toll of her honesty: a racing pulse, shaking hands, panic whirling through her body each time she admits, out loud, that she is an atheist. As an ex-fundamentalist navigating my own religious de- and reconstruction, her admission reverberated with me. I recognized her willingness to face and speak difficult truths.

I found that same courage in the pages of McCoy’s debut poetry collection, Wrecks, released in October 2025 by Noemi Press. The poems in this book operate as mirrors that invite us in, then transport us through time and space. We follow McCoy to a girls’ bathroom in the United States in 1995; alongside the great auks in Iceland in 1844; and into the company of the last living member of the Beothuk people. Spectres resurrect only to reenact their erasure. McCoy’s singular syntax resists easy interpretation and offers us something truer: the ineffable grief that lingers after colonial violence.

Take, for example, the opening stanzas of “On Swimming:”

Dearest but also, who can survive in too

sadness. It sinks you like a lead plumb. Dear

and also gone, chick departed, yet another,

yes. But quiet. See how the sky closes

all its doors, its sudden moods, shields us

from the gasp. What goes on in space?

McCoy’s halting lines embody the fracture, loss, and lament they describe. Her words urge us to bear witness, and then to move forward, to join her in a lesser kind of flight.

From Noemi Press: 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. You can buy Wrecks here: https://www.noemipress.org/catalog/poetry/wrecks/.

Reviewer Erin Edinger (she/her) is a poet and farmhand based in Northwest Arkansas. She serves as a teaching assistant at the CAFF Farm School, Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review, and reader for The Arkansas International. Erin earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Find more at erinedinger.com.