Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry collection Removal Acts is nothing short of astonishing. A descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Lynch’s title refers to the 1963 Federal Act that banished Dakota people from their homelands. From there she moves into all kinds of removals and erasures and violence, including poems about losing a dog and another about bulimia, in which the speaker tries to erase/remove herself in a whole new way. The book includes all kinds of visual representation, including concrete poems. One such poem is a “frame” where the text appears on the decorative outside, the picture blank except for very few words which include—“SORRY, THIS IMAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.” Another poem conjures the suffering of the poet’s uncle’s grandmother, a woman on a wooden wagon from a photograph found on FindaGrave.com. Elizabeth, a mother holding a child, is described around a blank silhouette in which we can imagine her. Another series of poems are in the shape of a tombstone for “Elizabeth.” In each successive version of the tombstone, the words are rubbed away, and in the final tombstone poem Elizabeth’s name is gone. Lineage is one of the themes of Removal Acts—and the book ends with a series of video stills in which Lynch puts on and takes off her great-grandmother Lenora’s Camp Fire Girls dress. Removal Acts is braided and nonlinear in the best way, in which the violence of the past is negotiated, mediated, witnessed.
Congratulations, Erin Marie!
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Author: Denise Duhamel
