The Museum of Unnatural Histories

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum_x000D_ _x000D_ This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup's poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in "an authorial reckoning//with what remains." Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena'ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Every artifact contains competing stories, while some display cases are left empty. _x000D_ _x000D_ Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and class: "Always, I've known I embody that which harms me." At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard._x000D_ _x000D_ Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to "decide/who you must become."_x000D_ _x000D_ [Sample Poem]_x000D_ _x000D_ Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot_x000D_ _x000D_ I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows_x000D_ but as herself. She's not here for the art._x000D_ She's here for the minivans that devour_x000D_ _x000D_ diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits_x000D_ for the doors to retract and expel fruit,_x000D_ Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking._x000D_ _x000D_ She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps. _x000D_ Like me, she won't appear human here. _x000D_...