Executive Overview
In the literary landscape of contemporary American poetry, few voices interrogate the architecture of historical memory with the fierce, idiosyncratic precision of Catie Rosemurgy. A distinguished author and educator whose previous collections—My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both published by Graywolf Press—have earned her prestigious fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Rosemurgy has long charted the fault lines where private consciousness collides with public narrative.
This week, The Missouri Review has designated her evocative piece, "Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)", as its Poem of the Week. This selection brings renewed critical attention to an ambitious ongoing project born from an unsettling encounter with regional heritage museums in the Upper Midwest.
The poem, anchored by an excerpt that details the relentless, overwhelming influx of humanity and material goods into a fictionalized or historical boomtown named Gold River, serves as a literary micro-study in mass accumulation, bodily trauma, and archival failure. By cataloging the physical detritus of settler-colonial expansion—ranging from mundane utilitarian objects like "stools, bunks, bowls, shovels" to the intimate, fragile inventory of the human body ("elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries")—Rosemurgy exposes the profound inadequacy of historical bookkeeping when confronted with the sheer, compounding weight of conquest and settlement.
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This comprehensive report examines the origins, thematic architecture, and broader cultural implications of Rosemurgy’s latest work, situating it within the author’s broader literary career and the ongoing national discourse surrounding historical curation and museum accountability.
Detailed Chronology: From Upper Midwest Museums to the Page
The genesis of Rosemurgy’s current poetic cycle traces back to a specific, haunting travel experience in the author’s native Upper Midwest. Returning to the landscape of her youth, Rosemurgy visited two local history museums, institutions ostensibly dedicated to preserving the regional heritage of their respective communities. However, rather than finding a rigorous engagement with the region’s complex past, she encountered a pervasive, systemic omission: both museums largely whitewashed or entirely ignored the violent mechanics of colonial settlement that facilitated the establishment of these towns.
For Rosemurgy, this archival silence was not merely an oversight; it felt "hauntingly malignant." History, in these sanitised spaces, was presented as an inevitable blossoming of commerce and community, divorced from the systemic dispossession of Indigenous populations and the grinding, bodily toll exacted upon the early settlers themselves.
Central to this transformative experience was an exhibit at one of the museums: a meticulously crafted diorama depicting a once-thriving, now-deserted frontier boomtown—the very town in which the museum itself was situated. Standing before the glass case, staring down at the frozen, miniature white figures arranged in perpetual pantomimes of domestic and industrial labor, Rosemurgy experienced a profound creative catalyst.
Faced with the fatal mixture of political inability and willful unwillingness that prevents modern society from constructing a shared, honest public narrative of its own genesis, the poet resolved to give voice to the mute objects behind the glass. She began writing a series of poems designed to animate the tiny figures of the diorama, imagining what these miniaturized archetypes—including the schoolteacher’s wife trapped in an eternal domestic loop while a pie burns in the oven—might say if they were suddenly endowed with speech, memory, and the capacity to register the compounding physical and psychological costs of their environment.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Anatomy of Accumulation
To understand the poetic mechanics of "Diorama 1871", one must examine the specific excerpt highlighted by The Missouri Review. The poem utilizes a relentless, cascading cataloging technique—a literary inventory that mimics the overwhelming, logistical avalanche of westward expansion.
The newcomers arrived in Gold River in such large numbers. So much sudden. So many
stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails, cleavers, ladders
chutes, pipes, levers, cinches, planks, bolts, shears
stakes, plots, parcels, holdings, claims, allotments
freighters, schooners, barges, barks, steamers
disputes, interests, debts, ledgers, accounts
names, births, graves, clans, vows, curses, oaths
pins, hats, curls, cuffs, feathers, buttons, tokens,
elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries, knuckles, spines,
carvings, whittlings, peelings, dusts, shavings, fumes
spills, falls, pops, knocks, gouges, guttings
nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures, sprains
fractures, limps, twists, tears, pulls, knots
pithings, pokings, severings, suturings, swellings
infections, fevers, fugues, visions, airs, aches
contusions, blisters, ruptures, drainings
abrasions, breakings, brandings, bulgings
boils, plaques, rashes, pimples, pustules
scrapes, bumps, gashes, stings, dislocations
oozings, numbness, faintings, blindings, chokings
Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it.This structural architecture moves deliberately from the external to the internal, and finally to the pathological.
- The Infrastructure of Ingress: The poem opens with utilitarian hardware and industrial rigging ("stools, bunks, bowls, shovels," "chutes, pipes, levers"). This is the apparatus of survival and extraction.
- The Legal and Financial Machinery: It shifts rapidly to the bureaucratic apparatus of empire ("stakes, plots, parcels," "disputes, interests, debts, ledgers"). The land is instantly commodified, divided, and litigated.
- The Human and Corporeal Shift: Crucially, the catalog does not stop at inanimate property. It breaches the boundary of the human skin, listing bodily parts and intimate adornments ("pins, hats, curls" giving way immediately to "elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries").
- The Physical Degradation: The final movement of the inventory is an exhaustive, almost clinical nomenclature of trauma and pathology ("nicks, cuts, bruises," "pithings, pokings, severings," "boils, plaques, rashes," culminating in "oozings, numbness, faintings, blindings, chokings").
The concluding declaration of the excerpt—"Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it"—serves as Rosemurgy’s central thesis. The official archives, the museum dioramas, and the ledgers of the settlement era are fundamentally bankrupting documents. They cannot account for the true ledger of human suffering, bodily breakdown, and moral cost incurred by the colonial project.
Official Statements & Authorial Intent
In her official Author’s Note accompanying the publication, Catie Rosemurgy elaborates directly on the psychological and political imperatives driving her work:
"This poem is from a book I began writing after visiting two local history museums in the upper Midwest near where I grew up. Both museums largely ignore the role of colonial settlement in their curation, and that silence felt hauntingly malignant to me in the days after my visit.
One of the museums features a diorama of the once-thriving, now-deserted town in which the museum is located. As a way of exploring the fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness that prevents us from developing a shared, public narrative of our history, I began to write poems that imagine the tiny, white figures in the diorama beginning to speak."
Rosemurgy’s critique hits at a core anxiety within contemporary American cultural institutions. The sanitized nostalgia of local history museums—often designed to foster civic pride through selective memory—creates a profound dissonance for visitors sensitive to the foundational violence of American expansion. By framing this silence as "malignant," Rosemurgy elevates the erasure of Indigenous displacement and pioneer trauma from a passive omission to an active, toxic cultural pathology.
Her strategy of animating the diorama figures is a direct subversion of the museum’s intent. While the diorama is designed to freeze time, to render history as an aestheticized, manageable miniature safely encased behind protective glass, Rosemurgy’s poetry shatters the glass. It restores breath, pain, voice, and moral reckoning to figures who were meant to remain silent props in a comforting local myth.
Future Outlook: The Resonances of Rosemurgy’s Forthcoming Work
The designation of "Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)" as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week signals substantial anticipation for the broader poetry collection currently taking shape under Rosemurgy’s pen.
As historical institutions across the United States face mounting pressure to decolonize their exhibits, re-curate their collections, and confront the difficult truths of regional settlement, Rosemurgy’s literary intervention arrives at a crucial cultural juncture. Her work demonstrates how poetry can function as an alternative archive—one that captures what official ledgers and museum displays systematically omit: the tactile, sensory, and somatic reality of historical transformation.
Readers and scholars following Rosemurgy’s career can expect her forthcoming collection to further challenge the boundaries between lyric poetry, historical critique, and dramatic monologue. Through the mouths of her miniature townspeople, Rosemurgy is constructing a mirror for a nation still struggling to reconcile its mythologies of progress with the uncounted, unrecorded cost of its own making.
For readers wishing to explore Catie Rosemurgy’s work further, her previous collections, My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, are available through Graywolf Press, and the full text of her Poem of the Week can be accessed directly via The Missouri Review.
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