Publications

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum

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.

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.

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."