The Dying Room

The Dying Room is a haunting and precise debut that navigates the shifting terrain of transracial adoption and identity. Annemarie Eayrs crafts a lyric journey through dislocation, inheritance, and the slow, uncertain process of self-recognition. In these pages, the search for origin becomes both mythic and documentary-charting the blurred lines between origin and invention, history and dream. With restrained intensity and sharp, intimate imagery, The Dying Room makes space for dissonance, tenderness, and what can only be imagined into truth.

"An open and affecting debut collection reflecting on adoption, identity, love, and loss." -Nicole Chung

"How does one learn to live from a point of rupture-when the beginning is marked by abandonment, anonymity, and interrogation? In The Dying Room, a meticulously taut and heartrending debut poetry collection, Annemarie Eayrs fuses the lyrical and hypothetical to calculate the incalculable equation of loss, family, and unbelonging. 'I forget our love is not as visible / as matching blue eyes or the same blonde hair, my hair, / black and unyielding, untidy as I am, a problem, / I, a problem.' With unflinching clarity and courage, Eayrs faithfully returns to many possible histories to reconcile a better future, even if the present is an ever-seismic collage of tiny, daily deaths." -Su Hwang

"Seldom does a poet dare 'dwell in Possibility' to the extent that Annemarie Eayrs does in her searing collection, The Dying Room. In this case, the special difficulty is that the poems in fact dwell in the impossibility of the speaker ever knowing her past, her origins. All she knows is that she was given up by either her mother alone or by both parents, anonymously, at birth. While accepting this impossibility, Eayrs presents the reader with an array of possibilities and their implications. The acute pain of the speaker when she addresses the fate of female infants under China's one-child policy is especially harrowing. The mark of a strong poet is one who challenges their vision to represent what is absent (in this case the birth mother and her decision, as well as the life she herself might have had being raised in China), while at the same time accepting the tragedy that these things can never be fully present. Eayrs does this with poetic skill and well-earned pathos: '...I feel loss when I hear / of loss, when others / like me mourn past lives / and things that might have been, / when loss turns to anger / that can find no clear direction...'" -Greg Hewett