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Erin Marie Lynch

Interesting story...                                    written in red ink                                    at the top of my                                    mother’s paper                                                                            ...Is this even true?                                                                                                                            1972—Eighth Grade American Indian Unit                                                                                                                            even then, her faultless cursive                                                                                                                            recounting her father’s recounting                                                                                                                            of Sitting Bull’s murdertoday we learnto say who we arein Zoom Dakota classtiles enclose faces                                COMMAND + SHIFT + A                                  unmute            shapes move through mouths                    Damákhota                    Oregon hemátaŋhaŋ ye                    Tuktédaŋ omáwapi šni ye                                                                                    afterward I forget everything                                                                                    walking the dog past beautiful                                                                                    people lifting weights, stretching                                                                                    by the bronze bust of Leif Erikson                                                                                    glistening populace of the open field                                                                                    shadows keep casual intimacy                                                                                    deepen in overlaps                            Homework: what is all the information you can give someone about yourself                            and what would your introduction sound like?                                                                                                                                        half-second misaligned                                                                                                                                                        perfecting an echo’s echobut my legs are            in running shorts and my face is             on dating apps and I check the box foron government forms ergo I am             in any residual sense             phenotypically slash culturallyslash             in terms of my rearing as well as            in case of receipt of cultural or academic capitalfrom the largely             establishment that is to say I am             to any glance             passing or otherwise                                                      in the documentary                                                    a fisherman’s voice-over                                                       we are living out long-term genocide                                                    he slits a salmon                                                    points to good flesh  the terms of             ness are long-term and to be             is endpoint of every room that has included mefor being meekly             and legibly                                                                                              “finally, there was the groundless shame of the inadvertent                                                                                            impostor” wrote Adrian Piper                                                                                            (she looked             to the gaze but wasn’t             )  if I wrote in             on             paperit would look like

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Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023). Her writing appears in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. A PhD candidate at University of Southern California, she lives in Los Angeles.

Cover of Removal Acts by Erin Marie Lynch

Seattle, Washington

"Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry book, Removal Acts, is a deeply personal, formally inventive investigation into history, ancestry, and loss. . . . Throughout the work, Lynch’s language remains precise, compassionate, inquisitive, and vulnerable."
—Mathangi Subramanian, BOMB Magazine

"Lynch interweaves the stories of two of her ancestors with her own recovery from bulimia to explore the twinned legacies of historical and self erasure. The result is a moving meditation on 'removal' in its many forms that melds together the personal and historical to craft a testament to Indigenous resilience and survival in the face of eradication."
—Eliza Browning, Electric Literature

"Removal Acts is a rich and fraught collection that confronts the legacy of displacement and erasure with searing honesty. Debut author Erin Marie Lynch does not shy away from hard questions, including her right to some of the stories in her collection. . . . Removal Acts combines technical prowess and attention to craft with deliberate experimentation, signaling Lynch as a poet with talent that far surpasses expectations for a debut author."
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

"By compiling absences, silences, and censures, Lynch exposes the colossal scale of settler violence on the American continent. She wields punctuation marks—brackets, arrows, and spaces—like weapons."
—Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet

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