Drawing its title from the American legislation promulgating the severing of multiple Native American nations from their homes, Erin Marie Lynch’s debut collection deeply inhabits psychological tensions of the sort that those who undertook the original Removal Acts could not. A Dakota descendant, Lynch’s perspectives on this legacy are also informed, in part, by the psychological awareness accrued by working through the harmful mental conditioning of an eating disorder. Her abiding kinship with her own shadow complicates assumptions about space as land or property; her own growth into unforeseen psychological terrain inspires work that understands space as shared and mutable, an open opportunity to meet self and other, for identities to evolve interdependently. Correspondingly, many of the poems evolve spatial forms that dialogue with their voices, as if continually making room for others’ perspectives.
“Opening Night at the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum” opens the pathologies of mental division between body and mind, invoking “a rat” that was “meant to be filled with TNT / and thrown into trenches, / but never deployed”:
A suit of skin Like a metaphor of violence, Seeing through the creature-bomb’s innovative cruelty, the poem works to understand the shadows of our creative power, particularly the ways minds can injure bodies as if they are separate. This moral awareness grounds the work of poetry: Mental connections such as metaphors and ideas must be qualified by relationship with their unconscious aspects or compassion for others. A series of poems entitled “Removal Act” deepen understanding of our thoughts’ unconscious aspects and their implications for personal and social health. One recontextualizes an eating disorder through a socio-political lens, asserting, “To vomit at will was my privilege” and “I had too much time to think of who to be.” This prepares us for the eating disorder’s misplaced celebration of the void: I liked to say, as if in wonder,
Ahh! Slipped gear in my brain. The past self is both performer and audience, both “sad and proud;” a mind aware of a “[s]lipped gear” that it also experiences as if itself. The “flush” feigns a return to life, while actually completing the ritual by obscuring its production. This power of the poem to bear witness to the cognitive dissonance from which it grew also informs “Before Recovery”: “How did I do it? I was a slack / suit of clothes, a treadmill’s / dry tongue lapping itself up.” However, a healthy, relational self also abides: “I fed / the dog more than myself.” Within this divide, “From hunger / comes hunger, sharpened” could refer to both the compulsive behavior and the observing mind’s persistent return to itself throughout the eating disorder’s interruptions, which is apparent in the poems’ objectivity and complexity. This perspective perceives the potential to move into new psychological spaces beyond the eating disorder’s artificial boundaries in the freedom intuitively offered to the dog: I emptied even The final sentence and line break capture both the otherness of and identification with the dog that allow it to mentor in love’s subtle power to transform. This process deepens with the dog’s death in another “Removal Act,” which evokes the soul’s longing for its lost friend subordinating the mind’s constructions: “the clouds arrayed in shapes / incomparable to any animal.” The existential void of meaning offers space for new movement—in stillness: “Unneeded, I / had no meaning. Or meaning // unmade itself, no longer / needing me.” The first “Removal Act” in the collection interconnects with the others in this soul making process. It uses text to frame an absent image of Lynch’s “great great great” grandfather, the last chief of the Oyate to sign a treaty with the US government. The text, which physically frames a computer screen’s “NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD,” discusses how family members copy the photo and display it in many of their households. Her deeply felt and considered relationship with the image evokes both life-affirming lineage and dehumanization: Up close, I feel the living distance between my forehead and his forehead. Up close, creases under his eyes, hooked arc of his nose, his broad upper lip all dissolve into ink dots. Asset number 645095001. Each dot a droplet. Each dot a void. Each dot sovereign. The opposite of diminishment: countless dots make up the face of the grandfather we place in every home.
The “living distance” of the ancestor who endeavored to live his own truth echoes in a part of the speaker who wishes to do likewise, despite the false claim that his image belongs to his oppressors. Paradoxically, the speaker bypasses this false authority through understanding of deeper uncertainties represented by the dots that make up the printed images, their duality of “void” and “sovereign” that summarily undercuts concrete conceptions of identity. In this context, the “Removal Act” poems, interspersed as they are throughout the collection, enact one model of a more flexible understanding of self: integral connections across empty space that are flexible enough to allow revision and leave room for the perspectives of others and the unconscious. This conception seems related to the collection’s intuited forms that both model and support the mind’s ongoing freedom to see itself and its acts clearly and dynamically. In expected syntax, for example, the poem “Knife” would appear to be primarily composed of right branching sentences. However, the isolation of active verbs in brackets disrupts inherited grammar. Each of the bracketed verbs seems to apply to the first word, “Hunger,” in interplay with the local syntactical meanings. The result is a web of associations between common household activities and an uncomfortable awareness of the duality between human-made divisions like “driveway seams” or the “checkered texture / from an airplane” of property lines, as opposed to “a landscape / boundaryless / unswallowing / petrified set of my lips / belonging to no one.” These disparities open a more comprehensive understanding of archetypal hunger informed by natural, personal, and cultural implications: white sheet cake they let me hold the knife [ divides ]
again and again
lengthwise The poem’s form demands a process of rereading that holds multiple perspectives in mind at the same time, working against the kinds of divisions it presents—and their embroidery. It challenges assumptions about how we read—interpret. Correspondingly, several poems involve Lynch’s complicated educational journeys. “To Go There” uses bracketed narrative and italicized quotation in present and remembered scenes, highlighting their concurrence and dissonance in consciousness: [ the Dakota scholar replied ] You have to go there Don’t forget you come from The infinitive title contrasts with the improvised form, which resembles notes and associative marginalia jotted during a lecture. The tension captures a moment of soul making, both in its “infinitive” detachment and its poesis, bringing present and internal voices into dialogue. “Statement of Purpose” approaches another inner divide, between “a life typing what other people say” and the poet’s academic description of her own work as “eschewing abstract words, / like poetry, for concrete ones, like poem” (61; italics original). Frustration with this absurdity prompts the rebuke of an internalized audience: “Did you like that? Did I please you? Do my / concerns reveal a clear thematic line?” Deepening self-reflection and more objective meditations follow in distinct sections, the turn initially demarcated by “00000000.” This gesture quickly accrues chilling complexity: “For twenty years, the nuclear launch code at US weapons silos was set to 00000000, / to minimize delay.” The power and indifference of these figures associate with “The ease / with which I typed / that [ATM] code,” and the normalization of potential catastrophe overlaps with the cynicism of a country that “makes up zeroes / every day” and the self-preserving normativity that underwrites coercive power: Nothing follows generations and a resulting politeness The zeroes’ take on a duality somewhat like the dots in the printed image: They evoke power’s potential to nullify while figuring an emptiness from which one sees through social constructions. This awareness fosters deeper reflections upon the self and its expression, the poem, rejecting the learned “proper subject for the lyric,” a product of the same social conformity. A reconsideration situates “The lyric’s / constrained // speaker’s / small desire” in response to “My country / pervaded by / an inarticulate / lyric pressure”: On the other side that has followed me In a true turn from the modes of conditioning the poem has moved through, subtle perception rejuvenates the intuitive process that delivered it: Hereafter The final lines’ repetition reenacts the process of deepening from memory through intuition to deeply felt connection. The pun in “Hereafter” gestures toward both a measure of ego death and an embrace of a perspective open to unfolding life, embodied in the integrative formal transformations of the poem. In this light, the final repetition, perhaps a mimesis of the heartbeat itself, may indeed be a memorization of this process, in which we must continually attend to these various dialogues with the historically silenced, the body, the soul in the image. Paradoxically, opening to personal shadows allows, indeed necessitates that such relationships form and reform; hence, we are invited to read as these poems challenge us to, through an integral dialogue of feeling and thought, to become ourselves a space for their ongoing conversation, to “become // By heart” along with them. Removal Acts, by Erin Marie Lynch. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, October 2023. 136 pages. $18.00, paper. Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing When People Cut Off Your Head and Leave It Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and has taught at The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, The Bowery Poetry Club, and several community outreach and children’s centers in Westchester. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
can be filled, emptied,
filled again. Ripped,
split, sewn, thrown.
almost violence.
It made me sad and proud.
Rattle of the chain before the flush.
my voice. On my knees
to pray, I chewed my gums
instead, chewed my mouth
to shreds. I was the door,
the gash in the screen. I was
the dog, slipping through.
embroidered with roses
not a word written on it
I sliced
crosswise
I don’t find angst about personal identity interesting or helpful
[ note in my phone: “no point in being fraught” ]
[ grandpa said ]
It would be good for you to go there
[ is all this citation
a way to prove
my legitimacy ]
[ hand on my shoulder]
Don’t go getting lost
like zeroes in bank accounts
concerning origins
of self-recognition
lies a secret
undulating form
for generations
I desire
To become
*
By heart
By heart
By heart
Heavy Feather Review 