Annie Wenstrup, The Museum of Unnatural Histories

  

1997:

Breaking sounds like a glacier
calving. Like ice sheets crashing 

onto saves. A wave is water
oscillating between the moon’s pull 

and the seabed’s cradle. A wave
is the shape of the tension 

between them. the largest waves
form when the seabed cracks, 

when earth’s long subducted core
rises and displaces the reaching 

water. Earth births the largest waves
by breaking her body. The anchor breaks 

the news. Her camera’s eye brines
the living room blue.

2023:

I no longer watch the news
but my body thinks about breaking
on schedule. At 5. Again at 6, 

an update at 10. (“1997 JonBenét Ramsey Tap Dances”)

The full-length poetry debut by Annie Wenstrup, a Dena’ina poet from Anchorage, Alaska, is the impressive The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a collection composed of an assemblage of remarkably-precise lyric poems articulating her immediate present, from cultural figures to what the cover copy describes as “the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved cultural violence [.]” Through an opening cluster and seven sections—“GGUGGUYNI TRANSCRIBES THE ARCHIVES,” “THE BLUE WING,” “POLICIES AND PROCEDURES,” “PERFORMANCE ART,” “RETROSPECTIVE: A MILLION CATACLYSMS LIVE INSIDE MY BODY,” “THE CURATOR’S OFFICE” and “FUTURE EVENTS”—Wenstrup speaks to cultural violence, erasure and revision, and the losses that continue to be felt, all framed through and against the argument of depiction, much of which has too long been shaped by those from the outside. “I imagine // the portraits of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s papoose,” she writes, as part of “Pretending to Be a Woman, I Roam, the Museum,” a poem that sits in the book’s untitled preface section, “Keep America Beautiful’s Crying Indian, / Mattel’s Eskimo Barbie, Disney’s Pocahontas, // and how they must face each other after the lights / darken, how they must wipe off war paint, how / they must unfeather their hair.”

Writes of cataclysms and depictions, Wenstrup articulates the voice and stories of Ggugguyni, named for the Dena’ina Athabaskan word for the raven, such as the opening poem, “Sukdu’a,” that writes: “Once Ggugguyni in her human form / walked by the river. She left her right eye / behind as a lookout. The eye saw the Dena’ina // draw near and it called to Ggugguyni. / Ggugguyni cried to the Dena’ina, Don’t touch / but watch! She tossed her eye into the air // three times. It looks out for your luck she said.” Her lines are sharp, enough to bleed. Through the voice of Ggugguyni, she articulates the frame of the museum, of the archive, shaping a context from within the context of that lived experience, offering portraits, transcriptions and self-portraits, working as a reclamation (comparable to elements of Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s ongoing work), and to navigate what might be seen as contradiction. “I ate and the fireweed blazed.” begins “As Persephone,” “Roadside blooms / snared roadkill while asphalt caught leaves, the way / calloused hands snag silk.” Writing through and around references to murdered and missing indigenous women to JonBenét Ramsey, Jackson Pollack, Rube Goldberg and Wile E. Coyote, each element speaks to not only loss but the need for agency, even in death. “How beautiful, how lovely the women // are. If missing,” she writes, as part of “Ghost Pixels,” “I hope they’re not dead. / When they die, we dissect their lives / into made-for-TV docu-dramas like bodies // preserved in formaldehyde. Blonde hair floats / on screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echo / here.”