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.
"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
"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
“…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
“In this sharp debut, […] Lynch deconstructs a violent past and present, while allowing herself and the reader to search for paths toward an as-yet unknown future.” —Dasia Moore, The Boston Globe
“A remarkable book about archival violence, family legacies, whiteness, erasure, American mythology, personal transformation, and so much more.” —Laura Sackton, Book Riot
“Lynch defies every expectation for a debut collection, brilliantly challenging what we know of the genre as well as how we approach physical space on the page. This is a richly layered and intelligent book that refuses to be contained.” —Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
“Erin Marie Lynch has written a stunning debut that transcends the genre-expectations of a “first book” to offer something more erudite, ambitious, and virtuosic in scope. As a collection, it possesses the emotional, formal, and intellectual maturity of a poet working at the height of her craft.” —James Ciano, The Adroit Journal
"Removal Acts is braided and nonlinear in the best way, in which the violence of the past is negotiated, mediated, witnessed."—Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry Blog
"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
“There are many different ways to approach this word removal and its attendant histories, and Erin Marie Lynch does them all so well. […] an ambitious and polished collection that offers new discoveries and understanding with each reading.” —Anne May Yee Jansen, Book Riot
“Removal Acts achieves a wonderful balance between formal experimentation and tenderness. Erin Marie Lynch’s voice is precise, scathing, and yet quivering with love for whatever subject she chooses to write of––a lost ancestor, a dog, the speaker’s own hunger. Using newspaper articles, family anecdotes, and photographs, these poems restlessly search for a different epistemology to scrutinize the myriad ways we disappear under self-inflicted or state-sanctioned violence. Furious and intelligent, Lynch’s lyricism is always supreme and surprising; her lines dance and swivel and yet they injure me. This is an incredible book.”—Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage
“Among the many things Erin Marie Lynch’s poetry is teaching me are that: the ancestors are walking in circles inside us; transgenerational trauma often resembles the performance of seeking a form in which to reenact our beloved dead’s undying; to be a descendant is to contribute to and fall through the weaving and fraying of the immemorial heirloom; and that the greatest loss, i.e., theft, is that of the future. It is poetry as the process of recovering what has been stolen in spirit. I read Removal Acts ingenuously, bodily, and in unending yet generative sorrow.”—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall
“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
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