Salt, Ink, and Sunshine: The Unfinished Verse of Renee Nicole Good
- Seagulls Post
- Jan 8
- 3 min read
Seagulls Post
Salt, Ink, and Sunshine: The Unfinished Verse of Renee Nicole Good (1988–2026)
In the quiet corners of the literary world, we often speak of the "poet’s eye"—that specific, relentless way of looking at the world that excavates the sacred from the mundane. Renee Nicole Good (published as Renee Nicole Macklin) possessed that eye in abundance.
On January 7, 2026, the Minneapolis literary community and the world at large lost a vibrant soul. At just 37 years old, Renee was taken from us in an act of senseless violence,moments after completing the most universal and tender of daily rituals: dropping her six-year-old son off at school.
To the headlines, she is a victim. But to the literary world, she was an award-winning voice from Old Dominion University’s Class of 2020. To her social media followers, she was a self-described "shitty guitar strummer" and a woman "experiencing Minneapolis" with wide-eyed curiosity. To those who knew her best, she was, above all, a mother.
The Art of the Ordinary
Renee’s life was a tapestry woven from the threads of creative devotion and maternal love. She did not compartmentalize her roles; she allowed them to bleed into one another.She was a mother to a daughter (15) and two sons (12 and 6), and she approached parenting with the same "messy art" philosophy she applied to her writing. She was the architect of movie marathons and a woman of "pure sunshine," a description that stands in devastating contrast to the winter gray of her passing.
Her poetry was characterized by what contest judges once called a "compounding of layers." She had a unique ability to move in and out of memory, creating work that felt both visceral and ethereal. Whether she was writing about the "salt and ink" on her palms or the "coastal jungle sounds" of cicadas, her work remained tethered to the physical world—the same world she navigated daily as a parent.
A Life in Stanzas
Having moved from Kansas City to Minneapolis, Renee brought with her a sense of adventure and a deep desire to document the "hard life and good life." She was a poet of the body and the earth, grappling with faith, science, and the passage of time.
In her work, we see a woman who refused to look away from the realities of biology or the complexities of the heart. She saw the body not just as anatomy, but as a "vessel of secrets." It is a tragedy beyond words that a woman who understood the sanctity of the human vessel was taken from us so violently.
Featured Work
In remembrance of her talent, we turn to her words. In her poem "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs," which won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize, Renee wrote of a longing to return to simple, rhythmic beauties. Today, as we mourn, the literary community finds itself echoing her sentiment:we want back the poet who saw the world with such startling clarity.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
(Winner of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize)
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets
from cicadas and pentameter from the
hairy legs of cockroaches
i've donated bibles to thrifts stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with
an acidic himalayan salt lamp-
the post -baptism bibles, the ones
plucked from street corners from the
meaty hands of zealots, the
dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of
high gloss biology textbook pictures;
they burned the hairs
inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off my palms.
Read the full poem here:
Renee Nicole Good leaves behind three children, a partner, and a community of writers who refuse to let her voice be silenced. We remember her not for how she died, but for how she lived: finding the meter in the cicadas, the metaphor in the muscle,and the poetry in every messy, beautiful moment of being alive.
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