Removal Acts

Removal Acts by Erin Marie Lynch is a powerful debut collection that reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable poetry explores the labyrinthine distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, Lynch crafts a rigorous examination of "removal" in its many forms - physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and self-erasure. This harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical is both a testament to resilience and a powerful affirmation of presence in the face of eradication. Lynch's virtuosic poems assemble an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. With Removal Acts, she has created a collection that will resonate with readers seeking a nuanced exploration of the complex relationships between history, identity, and personal experience.