“Lynn Emanuel’s Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is 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 in Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing open 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 skull—yet frees an off-screen voice that’s killer-eccentric, focused and sheer, flickering brilliant.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Blue Rose