Anatomies of Disappearance - Evan Dekens

Anatomies of Disappearance may be a collection of poems, but it is also a collection of rivers, highways, faces, and forgotten voices-namely, those of two cities, Newark New Jersey, and Wilmington North Carolina. It grapples not only with the speaker's fraught journey between the two, but with the historical legacy of racial violence whose presence still looms over both. What does it mean to live, especially as a white person, whose history is bound up so intimately with these histories, to live, write, love, and exist alongside the ghosts of violence? How does one construct not just their own history, but their familial and national history with any semblance of cogency? These are the questions the collection asks. And as it asks these questions, a set of distinct places and images emerge-the buildings, streets, and communities that inherit such legacies-the starkly contrasting food, skies, trees, and natural landscapes of the American North East and South. Anatomies of Disappearance explores themes of memory, loss, race, and the complex relationship between identity and place. It draws connections between distant points of physical space in order to excavate the often buried stories of families, cultures, and national memories. The work grapples with the silences and absences that shape both personal and collective histories, seeking meaning in what has been forgotten, erased, or unspoken.