Erin Marie Lynch’s enlightening and powerful debut poetry collection, Removal Acts (Gray Wolf Press), is a haunting meditation on historical violence, and the repercussions future generations face from the atrocities of such legacies—herself included. Lynch, a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, writes about the banishing of the Dakota people from their homeland in 1863 and how the ripple effects of that erasure informed the fractured relationship she carried into her own body, mind, and spirit, from struggling with bulimia to reckoning with ancestral genocide.
In the title poem, “Removal Act,” Lynch describes removals both literal and cultural: “I didn’t know/what it meant until meaning/sat still enough for me to see/nothing else. Then a man put/in my hand a pamphlet on loss./Big flat letters. A sun, rising/or setting above gray waves,/the clouds arrayed in shapes/incomparable to any animal.” Through Lynch’s beautiful poems, she shines a much-needed light on the very real yet complicated connection between our own suffering and that of the bodies we came from that came before us. She gives voice to our own potential healing, and perhaps with it, in some form, that of our lineage as well.
