Removal Acts

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

"I am astounded by this book and this poet, who offers us a reading experience unlike any other. Critical, capacious, and ingenious turn after turn, Removal Acts honors and embodies fraught complexities while maintaining keen aim and propulsive momentum. These poems are absolutely remarkable in their arrangements and conjurings; they add nuance and depth to my understanding of what it is to be alive as a permeable and striving self among selves. I read this book in one sitting, and when I reached the end, I wept--with gratitude, with awe. With Removal Acts, 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