Keynote
A remarkable debut exploring the silences left by displacement—of a people, of a lineage, and of the self
Book Title
Removal Acts
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Critical, capacious, and ingenious turn after turn, Removal Acts honors and embodies fraught complexities while maintaining keen aim and propulsive momentum. . . . Erin Marie Lynch has given us a gift of extraordinary proportions. I look forward to learning from this collection’s rigorous heart and marvels of form for the rest of my life.”—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
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”
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.
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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About the Author
Credit: Jonathan Chaco´n
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
