Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems [Paperback]

A Poetic Autobiography—Intimate, Sorrowful, and Funny

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 Diminishingis 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. “Lynn Emanuel’sTranscript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishingis a roiling hybrid of autobiographical poems from a writer who has lived enough to know that all memoir is elegy, and who is so craft-proficient that her blazing dexterity seems second nature. She’s so on. So on it. Early on, the plague itself speaks, showing just how much delicious damage a poem can do: ‘I cut their throats / with the scythe of a comma, turned the snout of my pen against them.’ This is a book that dangles from the edges I’ve dangled from and drowns in a white coffee cup set within a noir mise-en-scène I understand. It is Lynn Emanuel’s masterwork.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets “As in classic noir, the poems inTranscript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishingopen and shut like quick glimpses through window blinds: off-kilter, oddly lit, ominous. ‘Cinematic,’ yes, but not the director’s cut. As the author/auteur observes, this is a ‘mirror of lived experience.’ These heartsick, edgy, haunted poems stay camera distance from depression, pandemic, ghostly memory, and death, yet track the self with a voyeur’s passion. The imagined camera here ‘waiting for me in that emptiness’ never cuts away from inside the lóH