The Museum Of Small Bones

The Museum of Small Bones

Poetry. "'I longed to become / a jellyfish,' Miho Nonaka writes, 'so transparent no one / could tell my body / from the water I swim in . . .' The self wants both to emerge and to hide, to disappear and to be known. 'Who could have taught me to stay at home in my own body, she asks, all the while I traveled from one country to another . . . ?' Nonaka's position as a citizen of two cultures and many cities, one who is either always outside or else at home everywhere, allows her poems to turn language, body, gender and world like faceted gems, looking into their depths with irony, sorrow, and the endless curiosity voiced here by both poet and silkworm: 'How is it that I am here? Where does this appetite lead, if hunger points beyond its immediate end?'"--Mark Doty

The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

Bone Rooms

In the bone rooms of the Smithsonian Institution and other museums in the late nineteenth century, a scientific revolution was unfolding, as collectors engaged in a global competition to recover the best human skeletons, mummies, fossils. Study of these remains led to the discrediting of racial theory and the search for human origins and evolution.