Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

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, the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, Poetry, and Publishers Weekly. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has taught at many venues including the Warren Wilson Program and the Bread Loaf Conference.