Sarah Rose Nordgren’s chapbook The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022) challenges our preconceptions of what a chapbook is, what a poem is, what a woman is, what we are ourselves. The sectioned prose poem and book opener, “Imagined Dioramas,” starts us off among the artificial displays of the museum in order to expose the artificiality of home: “The snow,” is here “cut at home with a confetti maker,” reimagined “as cotton (or cotton as chimney smoke)”; “the world” is “painted on a grid to keep a level bend.” What is this imagined life? It is made, created. And it falls apart under scrutiny.

At the heart of the book, in her lyrical essay, “On the Fabric of the Body,” Nordgren describes a young woman’s intellectual journey through natural history toward a moment of self- transformation: “Without warning, her feet grow wide and deep as if they’re planted in the floor below the tub, and her skin, amniotic under running water, shimmers.” Later, “her body is a column pushing into the air in front of her.” In “The Lion For Real,” Nordgren enters animal consciousness and humanizes it: “a lion wants to trot across the pavement, through the doors, and into the ballroom to serve herself a greedy helping of waltz.” Her vision is double. It’s exhilarating and it’s terrifying.

If science, as Nordgren argues, embodies a desire to “hold the world still with definitions,” giving way to “the sheer exhaustion that comes from behaving as a mere man or woman,” the confines of categorical description, then poetry is counterweight: “In order to study her,” Nordgren states, “you must become the ape.” In the titular poem, a scathing depiction of creationism’s Mecca, Creation Museum in Kentucky, Lucy is sealed behind glass, unreachable. “Don’t stay behind you glass too long,” the speaker urges. “Let us smell your earthly scent, your halfway-human heat.”