I erased the world so nothing can find it, snuffed out the roses, red and hot as the snouts of bombs, repealed the polar ice cap, even that fat oxymoron, the “industrial park,” has disappeared.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.
Plague’s Monologue
Lynn Emanuel
Feature Date
- January 29, 2025
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“Plague’s Monologue” from Transcript of the Disappearance by Lynn Emanuel, © 2024. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, The Nerve Of It: Poems New and Selected, was awarded the Lenore Marshall Award by The Academy of American Poets. Her sixth book has just been completed and is under consideration by her press. Her awards include multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Poetry Series Award, the Eric Matthieu King Award also from The Academy of American Poets and, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Bennington College Low Residency MFA program. Her poetry has been published and reviewed in Poetry, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Review, LA Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, and Publisher’s Weekly.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
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.
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