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 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.

Lynn Emanuel is the author of Noose and Hook, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then Suddenly and, most recently, The Nerve of It, which received the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been collected numerous times in Best American Poetry and included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has been published and reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, LA Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, POETRY, and Publisher’s Weekly. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has taught at many venues including the Warren Wilson MFA Program and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Maggie Anderson is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dear All (Four Way Books, 2017). She is the founding editor of the Wick Poetry First Book Series and the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series for Ohio Poets. She co-founded Trellis, a poetry journal, and her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and her work has appeared in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. She is currently working on a novel.