Book Review

The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup is a dazzling, disorienting, and reorienting engagement with history, performance, and Indigenous identity. It is at once a display of mastery and a critique of mastery’s inherent and historical violence. Personas proliferate, as do forms. It is a concept book, opening like the doors to a museum. The reader steps into the first pages to encounter the first of several poems titled “Event Score for The Curator.” Styled like museum guide copy, the poem instructs:

Make the most of your time at the Museum of Unnatural Histories by following along with the event score. Carefully created and timed, the Event Score allows your body to mirror the curator’s path through the museum exhibits. See what she sees! Feel what she feels! Dwell inside the problem of empathy. Alternatively: you may pause the tracks at any time. You may complete her work at your own pace.

This peppy introduction micromanages the visitor’s, or reader’s, attention. Imperatives with buoyant exclamation marks heighten both the playfulness and the irony of the address, evoking the scripted gloss of museum guides or audio tours. Yet the immersive experience is also undercut: “Alternatively: you may pause the tracks at any time.” For this museum audio recording is, of course, also the book in our hands. The book’s technology enables the reader to pause, reread, flip back. The line “You may complete her work at your own pace” is prescriptive in the sense that the reader can only complete the work of the Curator. And at the same time, the line opens a fissure of agency. The reader, not the Curator, completes the work. The reader reflects and questions, whereas the Curator is bound by her own “carefully created and timed” score. It’s the reader who ultimately makes meaning. In this way, the reader is both guided through and implicated in the act of curation.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories is organized like a museum—neatly labeled, categorized, mapped, always with a layer of irony. We encounter archives, transcribed by Ggugguyni, who is a trickster figure and one of the book’s main characters, who scavenges in the museum parking lot, and whose name is a Dena’ina word for crow. We move into the Blue Wing, which is haunted by watery dead white women and girls like JonBenét Ramsey and Princess Diana. We encounter a “performance art” section, which scripts out a narrative of an eating disorder, speaking to the book’s concern with the damaging ideals of femininity. We see the speaker transform into self-portraits and shape-shifting visions of the self. We stumble into the Curator’s cluttered office, complete with a lost and found inventory, unfiled correspondence, a deleted chapter, an unsent memo. And finally, we reach an atrium near the exit sign titled “future events,” which includes a long, wonderful poem about the Polyphemus moth, and several poems that engage with apocalyptic scenes.

Wenstrup’s imaginative exhibits gesture toward the violent history of museums and their bloody relationship to Indigenous peoples and cultures, without naming this troubled legacy explicitly. Museums and anthropological collections have historically been built on practices of colonialism, grave robbing, and the appropriation of sacred objects. Artifacts have been seized, stolen, displayed, and misrepresented. Exhibits often portray Indigenous peoples as primitive or “vanishing” cultures rather than living, dynamic communities.

Rather than directly describing the museum’s legacy of violence, Wenstrup’s poems more often position the museum and Indigenous identity in a complex dance of power, appropriation, and reappropriation. Is the speaker aligned more closely with the figure of the Curator, or with Ggugguyni? The Curator regulates, gathers, names, affixes labels, and enforces policy. Ggugguyni crows mightily from the parking lot’s margins, pilfering fries, lurching and lunging. It’s Ggugguyni with whom the speaker directly identifies: “Like Ggugguyni, I’m a scavenger,” she writes, and, “Like me, Ggugguyni is a fan of forms.” But the speaker is a curator too, acknowledging, “I work my own inventory.” The Curator and Ggugguyni become less oppositional than porous, and the book’s speaker ultimately inhabits both. In doing so, Wenstrup speaks in the authoritative voice of the museum while maintaining a critical distance from it. The balance is complex, and it infuses the poems with a compelling sense of risk, indeterminacy, and shifting potential.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories is a parody, in the fullest sense of the term. The word “parody” is derived from the Greek para-ōidē or “song alongside,” suggesting that a parody can be both a critique and an act of admiration, even emulation. Wenstrup’s Museum becomes a “song alongside” the museum, simultaneously critiquing its flaws while embodying its form. Wenstrup makes brilliant use of the page’s margins, literalizing that peripheral space from which minoritized voices speak. Her footnotes talk back to the main text, offering criticism and revision. The first words of the first poem, “My Chada,” for instance, are footnoted: “Nouns: tricky things.” Nouns themselves are slippery, problematized; the ground underfoot is unstable. In other poems, Wenstrup arranges boxes vertically, so the reader must physically turn the book in order to read them. This reorienting motion throws the center off-balance and raises questions about the normativity of reading itself. Elsewhere, text boxes occupy the bottom of the page, set off from the main text in dialogue and in tension.

Sometimes Wenstrup’s parodic moves feel playful; at other times, they feel profound and deeply humane. In a poem called “About The Curator,” for instance, dark gashes on the page blot out lines of text, making absences visible. “What’s necessary in this story,” the poem begins, before a long redacted passage. Although we are denied access to it, the Curator’s human history exists in the censored archive. We witness, without being able to read or comprehend, the blanks that evoke the museum’s bureaucratic opacity, as well as deeper questions about what histories, what violences, and what peoples have been withheld, and by whose authority. In this context, references to Gauguin’s “Tahitian women labeled as paradise,” Captain Cook’s “sketches of Aleut women / labeled savage,” and Edward S. Curtis’s staged “mis-propped tributes to the frontier” call out the museum’s celebration of fetishistic colonial misrepresentation.

Of course, a book called The Museum of Unnatural Histories demands discussion of the natural versus the unnatural. The “unnatural history” stands in parodic contrast to the so-called “natural histories” enshrined in museums, with their glass-fronted dioramas of taxidermied animals arranged in lifelike poses, their skeletal remains catalogued on a clean white card, their human artifacts stripped from context and displayed as specimens. These exhibits reproduce the logic of conquest, transforming living beings and vibrant cultures into objects for viewing. In this way, Wenstrup’s book is a history of histories, exposing the constructed and often brutal narratives that underpin our understanding of the world.

Wenstrup’s critique of the natural also engages a contemporary theoretical conversation, particularly with texts like Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature. Morton argues against the humanist and Romantic concept of “Nature” as a separate, pristine entity, suggesting that this idea ultimately reifies human dominance over the environment. For Morton, the notion of nature hinders genuine ecological thought by positioning humans as outside observers, rather than as deeply enmeshed participants in a vast, interconnected web of life. Likewise, The Museum of Unnatural Histories dismantles the idea of a natural world and reveals instead a curated construct—a history that is, in fact, always already unnatural. By presenting an unnatural history, Wenstrup suggests that what we call natural is cultural, shaped by power and violence, and that the museum is implicated in maintaining that fiction.

Wenstrup imagines how poetry can inhabit and reconfigure the museum, reframe the exhibits, call back from the parking lot’s edges. The Museum of Unnatural Histories is an exciting and inventive book, one that unsettles the archive’s categories while creating new possibilities for identity, tradition, and care.