Photo by Tammy Lamoureux
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Darwin’s Mother and Best Bones, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Sarah Rose’s poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Sarah Rose lives, writes, and teaches in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina.
Praise for The Creation Museum:
In The Creation Museum, you can make confetti. In Sarah Rose Nordgren’s dreamy rooms, you can make sense, love, a baby, a poem, a stranger of your former self. Lick your teeth, click your camera. Look closer, Nordgren says. Change your angle, change your mind, change your body, change your species. Be hybrid, be supple, be shameless, be blur. Contain multitudes. There. Feel that hum, that surge? That’s you, becoming. That’s you, finally coming home to yourself.
—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Redmouth and Wilder
Sarah Rose Nordgren is a poet of precision and lush language in whose work dreams and the scientific imagination collide. In The Creation Museum, the history of science “is a list of moments when people changed their minds about the world.” Discoveries made centuries apart build on the curiosities and failures of those who came before, and ideas change minds little by little. In these prose poems, themselves dioramas of thought, beauty both precedes and succeeds brutality. The speaker is a woman who planted early frost before her birth, who becomes a lion, who blesses motherhood unflinching. The Creation Museum is a delight of language and contemplation in which Nordgren tests hypotheses of belief as a scientist of the supple open mind, inviting readers to do the same.
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, author of Hour of the Ox
Sarah Rose Nordgren’s The Creation Museum may speak of dioramas behind fiberglass, animal bodies painted and pinned, but make no mistake—these poems are ferociously alive with the desire to be both scientist and the subject of study. They throb and writhe under the light of their own looking, and what a dazzling sight these poems are to behold.
—Christopher Kondrich, author of Valuing and Contrapuntal
Creation Museum leads us through a series of investigations not unlike that in the Museum of Jurassic Technology: exhibits and questions that are both fantastical and wondrously close to the strange heart of things. Again and again, in essays, images, and poems, Sarah Rose Nordgren asks: What is real? What is true? Can the imagined be as true and real as the proven? What of the unknown? Channeling the structures of science and of the old-fashioned diorama (and what are poems beyond dioramas of words?) Nordgren examines the thin interface of the world, declaring, “My love is / viciouser and more soft.” That is, it’s exactly what we need to persist.
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Theorem