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Book Title

Removal Acts

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Erin Marie Lynch
Poem Excerpt
On the other side
of self-recognition
lies a secret
undulating form
 
that has followed me
for generations
 
            *
 
Hereafter
I desire
to become
 
By heart
By heart
By heart
—from “00000000”
 
Body
Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.
 
Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms—as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit—Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.
 

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List Price
$18.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-253-0
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
120
Trim Size
Trim Size
7 x 9
Keynote
A remarkable debut exploring the silences left by displacement—of a people, of a lineage, and of the self
 

About the Author

Erin Marie Lynch
Credit: Jonathan Chaco´n
Erin Marie Lynch is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her writing appears in Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.
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Praise

  • "Erin Marie Lynch has crafted a triumph in Removal Acts. [...] We are asked to sit with ideas of privilege, generational trauma, personal desire, and forms of guilt as Lynch constructs her world around us."—Abigail Hebert, October Hill Magazine
  • "Bloodlines, fringes, meanings."—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
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