Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing

Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein. Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, poems, and paragraphs. It explores and centers on the possibilities and limitations of art in the face of disappearances of many kinds, including the disappearance that is most personal—the poet’s own.

—PLAGUE’S MONOLOGUE

I erased the world so nothing can find it, snuffed out the roses, red and hot
as the snouts of bombs, repealed the polar ice cap, even that fat oxymoron,
the “industrial park,” has disappeared. And the last few words huddled
together, like bees in a hive buzzing and plotting? I cut their throats
with the scythe of a comma, turned the snout of my pen against them.
I saved by erasing the streets and the people—let them be overgrown
with absence. I don’t care—there is no limit to my appetite, my lust,
my zeal for emptiness. But I know you—and you have kept a transcript
of the disappearance.