Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on Tuesday morning, just streets away from her home, per lithub.com.
Witness accounts and video footage from the scene describe a chaotic confrontation between federal officers and community members.
According to reports from the Minnesota Star Tribune, agents surrounded Good’s vehicle and ordered her to exit. Footage appears to show the car reversing and then pulling forward before an agent fired multiple rounds into the vehicle.
Good, who lived in Minneapolis with her wife and six-year-old son, was a celebrated figure in the literary community. Writing previously under the name Renée Nicole Macklin, she was the 2020 recipient of the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize. Her winning work, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, was lauded for its visceral imagery and sharp command of language.
Her private social media profile poignantly described her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.”
The incident has sparked immediate outrage, with critics condemning the shooting as a “daytime execution.” As the Trump administration intensifies its domestic enforcement operations, civil rights advocates warn that such state violence is becoming increasingly frequent.
A memorial fund has been established to support Good’s surviving wife and young son.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renee Nicole Good (Macklin)
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 thrift 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 on my palms…
Read the poem here
