Protocols

An urgent, poetic exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language.  PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language.  By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future?  Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.

About the Author :
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Staford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press's 1st/2nd Book Award. Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025) and in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology from the Laurel Review. Forthcoming books include: Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves, 2026). Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West. www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

Review :
Reviews of PROTOCOLS: “Daniela Naomi Molnar’s ingestion of The Protocols’ verbal poison confronts the monstrousness of a ‘zombie text refusing to die’ and brings about a momentary reversal of trigger and trauma, valence and polarity. The heart of this audacious erasure glows in a darkness that’s ancient and very much of our moment. Disturbing and generative.” —Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems “This book is oracular, tender, and absolutely brilliant. Daniela Naomi Molnar looked into a foundational antisemitic text and traced a radiant meditation on power and being. Her essay about her grandmother Rosalie contains some of the best writing I have read about ancestry, inheritance, and survival. This book is a blessing, a transmutation of suffering into a spacious body of language and light.” —Rachel Jamison Webster, author of Benjamin Banneker and Us “‘We are repeat children,’ poet Daniela Naomi Molnar writes in this searing, necessary meditation on inherited trauma, cycles of violence, and the possibility of healing. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a fragmented psalm, an outcry, a fractured cultural memoir, and a gripping and timely reflection on how human beings can choose to use language to destroy—or to rebuild.” —Alicia Jo Rabins, author of Fruit Geode and Divinity School “PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a text that holds within it the complexity of inherited Jewish trauma, the courage to reject exceptionalism and its supremacist logics, and the tenderness to honor loss and cradle the grieving body across generations. In PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar asks: ‘How to not be history’s accomplice?’ This book is a master class on grief and the creative, regenerative impulse, metabolizing trauma and loss into a form that both mourns and resists. Brave, meticulous, haunting, and brilliant, this book is a journey of transfiguration, a widening of my mind.” —Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred “At once a reckoning and a declaration, Daniela Naomi Molnar demands of the past a yielding to something new. Leaving traces of historical violence visible while aspiring to 'that / which cannot be / individual,' Molnar carves through the pages of histories’ hauntings to sculpt a new surface, textured with liberatory possibilities, laced with the temptations and catastrophes of belonging, and reaching towards care—towards ‘a new, spacious body through which to speak.’” —Rachel Kaufman, author of Many to Remember “In her unflinching work PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar reexamines one of the most antisemitic documents in world history, asking us ‘to return to the / center / to be / nothing / honestly.’ Molnar's brilliant erasure reveals her generous, undaunted craft, inventing new sites of possibility that emerge—even from the abhorrent ruins of the source text. Molnar lyrically asserts that, even amid despair and cynicism, ‘our hands    exist / as love,     a boundless / agriculture / of intelligence.’” —Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery “Erasing the world's most influential antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Daniela Naomi Monlar's PROTOCOLS: An Erasure repurposes the violence, theft, and mutilation of its source text, reducing The Protocols to only what is needed to express the effects and affects of living in antisemitism's snare—to only what is needed to show what it means to be bound by history to language that seeks to erase your being—to only what is needed to untie the constraints of that language.” —Adie B. Steckel, Fonograf Editions Reviews of CHORUS: “‘Whose afterimage am I?’ Molnar asks in her striking debut. [...] These poems do not deliver tidy answers to the dilemmas of existence, but rather investigate the division and fragmentation with lyric urgency.” —Publishers Weekly “In Chorus, Daniela Naomi Molnar enacts, questions, argues with, weeps over, delights in, deserts, and returns to a multiple and various self, a self joined by a chorus of other voices as well as the living and nonliving entities—stars, trees, mountains, ghosts—that inhabit these poems. [...] Chorus is a companion for grief-filled times. It does not offer salve or resolution. It offers recognition. It bears witness to pain, and to beauty. It reminds us that the two are as entangled as everything else. It suggests that within that entanglement, from a recognition of all beings’ intertwined fates we might find survival.” —Allison Cobb, Tinderbox Poetry Journal “‘Breathless’? ‘Relentless’? ‘Insistent’? It's like a torrent of impressions, but beneath the chaos there is this intention steadying the poem amidst all this activity. Meaning I don't feel confused reading it. I feel this intentional guide firmly pointing me in directions. Like the poem is full of this assured energy; it guides the poet and reader forward. It's a poetry of the forceful lyric.” —Kent Shaw, The Kalliope “CHORUS is a lyric wail stunned into awakening by crises both planetary and personal—though here, as in the physical universe, the two are not oppositional phenomena. Pieces made of fragmented verse, sinuous prose, and desperate frenzied plea make a rhetoric of salve, or salvation. As the poet writes, ‘The songbird is and is not a metaphor./The songbird is and is not gone.’ What I mean to say is to you (I meaning me, you meaning absolutely you, the one reading this) is that this is a book that speaks from a body and to a body. I felt spoken to. Known. ‘Are you there. Is anyone there.’” —Kazim Ali, judge of the 1st/2nd Omnidawn Book Contest 2021 “Tendrilic, electric, Daniela Naomi Molnar's CHORUS traces a mind in swift action. A near daybook, this collection is intimate and expansive, born of the solitudes highlighted in the pandemic, while resistant to the individualisms thrust upon us. It is a choral undertaking that points to the ecosystems of our languages, the subterranean connections between our lives and the world, and the ‘open portals’ of books in our current fires. A stunning book by a poet I am excited to follow.” —Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs “CHORUS beautifully embodies the ancient function of its title: an ‘I’ gathers to speak communally, to and of the crux in which we find ourselves. Locating luminous detail amidst the disaster, these poems, are portals open to the personal, the collective, the playful, and the innovative, offering us language's capacity to bring us to our senses.” —Eleni Sikelianos, Oregon Book Award judge