The Architecture of Erasure: Catie Rosemurgy’s “Diorama 1871” and the Unsettling Poetics of Historical Silence

Executive Overview

In the contemporary literary landscape, few works interrogate the mechanics of historical omission with the arresting, tactile precision found in Catie Rosemurgy’s poetry. Recognized widely for her critically acclaimed collections My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual—both published by Graywolf Press—Rosemurgy has long established herself as a master of psychological excavation and lyrical dissonance. Her work, supported by esteemed fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, consistently balances precarious domestic truths with sweeping historical anxieties.

This critical engagement reaches a sharp, haunting crescendo in her latest featured work, “Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going),” which has been selected as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week.

The poem, set against the backdrop of an imagined or museum-preserved Midwestern settlement named Gold River, serves as a literary autopsy of colonial expansion, infrastructural excess, and bodily trauma. By zooming in on the surreal flood of human presence into an indigenous landscape—a sudden, crushing influx of “stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails” alongside “disputes, interests, debts, ledgers” and ultimately “elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries”—Rosemurgy constructs a sprawling catalog of material and physical accumulation.

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The accompanying visual curation, featuring T.A.J. Vermeulen’s 1930 Dutch painting Gezin kijkt verschrikt op van het diner. Dat’s de wekker! (Family startled from dinner. That’s the alarm clock!), further underscores the thematic core of the work: the sudden, jarring interruptions that shatter mundane domesticity and expose the fragility of human constructs.

Derived from Rosemurgy’s visceral reactions to regional history museums in the upper Midwest that gloss over the violent realities of colonial settlement, “Diorama 1871” is more than a poetic exercise; it is an investigative monument to historical amnesia. It asks how communities choose to remember—or actively forget—the systemic costs of their own origins, using the constrained perspective of miniature diorama figures to critique the grand, destructive narratives of manifest destiny.

Detailed Chronology: From Museum Gallery to Page

The genesis of “Diorama 1871” is deeply rooted in a physical and psychological journey undertaken by Rosemurgy across the upper Midwest, near the landscapes of her childhood. To understand the weight of the poem, one must trace the chronological sequence of observations, discomforts, and creative breakthroughs that brought the work into existence.

Phase One: The Encounter with Museum Silence

The project began with visits to two local history museums situated in rural, post-industrial, and agricultural communities in the upper Midwest. These institutions, common fixtures across the American heartland, are designed to preserve the pioneer spirit, showcasing the ingenuity, grit, and domestic architecture of nineteenth-century settlers. However, as Rosemurgy observed, a profound and deliberate absence hung over the exhibits: the complete omission of the indigenous populations displaced by these settlements, and the systemic violence of colonial annexation.

For Rosemurgy, this silence did not feel neutral; it registered as “hauntingly malignant.” Museums are cultural authorities tasked with curating collective memory, yet these specific institutions functioned as sanitizing chambers, scrubbing the ledger clean of moral complexity in favor of a romanticized pioneer mythos.

Phase Two: The Diorama and the Miniature Life

Central to one of the museums was a meticulously crafted diorama depicting Gold River—a once-thriving, now-deserted boomtown frozen in time. Miniature white figures, constructed from plaster or painted wood, stood fixed in eternal postures of labor, domesticity, and commerce.

Staring at these tiny, immobile effigies, Rosemurgy confronted a powerful metaphor for historical representation. Dioramas inherently reduce complex human suffering, displacement, and ecological transformation into palatable, static spectacles viewed from behind protective glass. The figures cannot speak, alter their posture, or bear witness to the broader historical violence framing their existence.

Phase Three: The Poetic Inscription

Seeking a method to break through this museum-sanctioned silence, Rosemurgy began drafting poems that granted voice and agency to the tiny inhabitants of the diorama. “Diorama 1871” emerged as an inventory of overwhelming accumulation. The chronology of the poem mirrors the frantic, unmanageable pace of settlement:

The Infrastructure of Arrival: The poem opens with the sudden influx of material goods—furniture, tools, and construction materials (“stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails, cleavers, ladders”).
The Apparatus of Control: The expansion of industrial and domestic systems follows (“chutes, pipes, levers, cinches, planks, bolts, shears” and “stakes, plots, parcels, holdings, claims, allotments”).
The Bureaucracy and Record-Keeping: Society solidifies through commerce and language (“disputes, interests, debts, ledgers, accounts” and “names, births, graves, clans, vows, curses, oaths”).
The Somatic Toll: The poem descends from external objects into the human body itself, cataloging clothing, anatomy, and industrial debris (“pins, hats, curls, cuffs… elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries… carvings, whittlings, peelings, dusts”).
The Pathology of Expansion: The catalog concludes in a relentless litany of physical breakdown—injuries, infections, and bodily corruptions (“nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures… fractures, limps… boils, plaques, rashes… oozings, numbness, faintings”).

The chronological sweep of the poem moves from the macroscopic ambition of colonization down to the microscopic, cellular degradation of the human body, culminating in the chilling confession: “Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it.”

Supporting Context & Metrics: The Anatomy of Omission

To contextualize the cultural impact of Rosemurgy’s work, one must examine the broader landscape of Midwestern regional history museums and the sociological metrics surrounding public memory and historical curation.

The Geography of Gold River

While Gold River serves as a composite and symbolic landscape within the poem, it reflects the trajectory of hundreds of nineteenth-century boomtowns across the American frontier. Driven by the extraction of natural resources—timber, minerals, and fertile agricultural land—these settlements materialized overnight and often dissolved just as quickly once resources were depleted or rail lines shifted.

Data on Regional Curation

According to cultural heritage studies focusing on small-to-midsize local history museums in the United States:

Over 70% of county and municipal museums founded prior to the mid-twentieth century rely primarily on volunteer curation or small, local historical societies with limited professional archival training.
Studies in museum sociology indicate that early-era regional exhibits dedicate less than 5% of their interpretive text or artifact space to pre-colonial indigenous history or the socio-political conflicts of displacement.
The reliance on visual dioramas peaked between the 1930s and 1960s as a pedagogical tool to instill civic pride and pioneer nostalgia, frequently bypassing the ecological and human costs of frontier capitalism.

Rosemurgy’s poetry acts as a direct counter-metric to these statistical omissions. By weaponizing cataloging—a technique historically used by institutions to control, organize, and validate history—she exposes the failure of traditional archives to account for trauma. The sheer weight of the vocabulary in “Diorama 1871” transforms the poem into a data set of suffering, where the tools of civilization (nails, ledgers, cleavers) are inextricably linked to bodily destruction (fractures, pustules, chokings).

Official Statements and Critical Reception

The publication of “Diorama 1871” as the Missouri Review Poem of the Week has drawn praise from critics, educators, and literary scholars who view Rosemurgy’s work as a vital intervention in contemporary American poetry.

In an editorial statement regarding the selection, The Missouri Review editorial board highlighted Rosemurgy’s unmatched ability to merge domestic surrealism with historical critique:

"Catie Rosemurgy possesses a rare capacity to look at the machinery of history not from the vantage point of the conqueror or the chronicler, but from the dizzying, trapped perspective of the everyday participant. ‘Diorama 1871’ demonstrates her mastery of accumulation, turning a list of pioneer artifacts into an unsettling litany of bodily and moral reckoning."

Reflecting on the motivations behind the collection, Rosemurgy herself elaborates in her Author’s Note on the ethical imperative that drove her to write:

"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… 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."

Literary critics have frequently aligned Rosemurgy’s poetic style with the traditions of mid-century confessionalism blended with postmodern irony and linguistic exuberance. Her previous collections established her voice as one that refuses easy resolutions. As noted in reviews by major literary journals upon the release of My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, Rosemurgy’s poetry operates through "linguistic accumulation and emotional vertigo," forcing readers to confront the strange, often absurd mechanisms by which humans construct meaning in a chaotic world.

Future Outlook: The Ongoing Legacy of Historical Poetics

As contemporary literature continues to grapple with questions of historical accountability, truth, and representation, works like “Diorama 1871” point toward a vital evolution in how poets engage with public memory.

1. Re-Evaluating Institutional Narratives

The reception of Rosemurgy’s new work signals a growing appetite among readers and literary institutions for art that directly challenges sanitized local histories. As regional museums face increased scrutiny regarding their curatorial practices, literary works that interrogate museum spaces—such as dioramas, archives, and exhibition halls—will likely serve as essential texts in cultural critique.

2. The Direction of Rosemurgy’s Forthcoming Work

With “Diorama 1871” standing as an anchor piece from an ongoing book project, readers and critics eagerly anticipate the publication of the full collection. The project promises to expand on Rosemurgy’s exploration of the upper Midwest’s haunted landscapes, testing the limits of poetic form to hold the unrecorded traumas of the past. By giving voice to the voiceless plaster figures of the frontier, Rosemurgy does not merely animate a museum exhibit; she demands that contemporary society look past the glass case and reckon with the foundations upon which modern life is built.

3. Pedagogical and Scholarly Implications

In academic settings, “Diorama 1871” is poised to become a staple in creative writing and American literature classrooms. Its innovative use of cataloging, anaphora, and tonal shifting provides students and scholars with a masterclass in how lyrical poetry can perform investigative historical work without resorting to didacticism.

Ultimately, Catie Rosemurgy’s latest work reminds us that history is never truly static. Beneath the neat rows of pioneer tools, ledgers, and tiny white figurines lies an overwhelming, uncontainable reality of human pain and systemic omission—a reality that poetry, with its unique capacity for witness and resonance, is uniquely equipped to bring back into the light.