Book Review: The Missing Museum by Amy King

Reviewed by Emma Bolden

The Missing Museum
Poems by Amy King
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016
$14.00; 114 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1939460080

In February 2012, the Russian feminist punk/performance art/protest group Pussy Riot staged an act of protest against the re-election of Vladimir Putin. Between services at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox church destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, the women entered and walked up to the altar, jumping and jabbing their fists in the air. Filmed footage of the performance was included in the music video for their song, “Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away.” The song implores the Virgin Mary to “banish Putin” and “become a feminist, we pray thee.” Although Cathedral guards removed the group in less than a minute, three group members were arrested, charged with hooliganism, and sentenced to two years in prison.

After the American election of 2016, Pussy Riot warned Americans to prepare themselves: Trump’s presidency, they predicted, would resemble Putin’s in ways that many Americans might not even be able to imagine. In a December 2016 interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova told New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg that it was “important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.’ [ . . . ] in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.” It isn’t safe, Tolokonnikova continued, to trust that America’s institutions will protect its citizens and their freedoms, as “a president has power to change institutions and a president moreover has power to change public perception of what is normal, which could lead to changing institutions.”

Pussy Riot’s work serves as a frame for Amy King’s riotous, rapturous, and radical fifth full-length collection, The Missing Museum. I mean “frame” quite literally: a passage from the poem that shares part of its title with the first section of the book, “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY,” is printed on the back cover. “I HAVE A WITCH-CHURCH HAND,” the speaker declares in the poem, “& / PUSSIES RIOTING A PUTIN PRAYER / ON A NATION OF PEOPLE.” Just as Pussy Riot composed the clarion call of an iconoclastic culture countering Russian authoritarianism and repression, so too does Amy King’s work spur, capture, and curate the artifacts of a burgeoning resistance movement in the United States.

Also like Pussy Riot, King’s use of the term “pussy” serves as a shibboleth for revolutionary feminism, reclaiming a term used as a slur against women—and, as the 2016 release of Access Hollywood footage shows, one often linked linguistically to sexual assault and rape. Through reclamation, feminists empty the term of its misogynistic implications, empowering themselves by taking ownership of the language of the oppressor. Now, “pussy” has become a common part of the American vernacular, wielded by women fighting to preserve their fundamental rights to control their own bodies and speech. Likewise, Pussy Riot’s music carries great meaning for the American resistance and for the poems in this collection, which serve, in many ways, as a museum preserving the gathering motion of resistance.

Unlike many museums, King’s isn’t a collection of evidence of an unchanging monolithic culture. Instead, the book protests the very idea that any culture or subculture is, was, or ever will be stable, static, and homogeneous. King’s poetry sweeps through cultural references from surrealist painter Leonora Carrington to soul singer and activist Nina Simone to pop singer Lionel Richie. The sheer breadth of references in King’s work echoes the idea that no culture is singular or stationary. The disparate works—songs, paintings, poems, acts of civil disobedience—of all of these artists cross through the collection as separate but equally essential works and workers of culture. As King writes in “You Make the Culture,” “The words become librarians, custodians of people.” If any representation of a culture is to be accurate, she continues, it is to involve movement: “I will walk with the sharks of our pigments / [ . . . ] until we leave rooms that hold us apart.” Inclusivity, and the ability to envision all groups in terms of belonging, is essential, as lines near the end of the poem show: “Nothing comes from the center / that doesn’t break most everything apart.”

After all, culture is the product of changeable, mutable human beings who, King argues in the collection’s prologue, “Wake Before Dawn & Salt the Sea,” are more action than object: “Our limits may not be expandable, but before you say, / ‘Blood and sinew,’ remember you’re making a mistake. / We are not edges of limbs or the heart’s smarts only.” As such, a worthwhile life is a life beyond “noise,” beyond “dying full of money but no one will give a shit, rich asshole.” To be stationary, to live untroubled while following the American exhortation to gain money and power without examining the dangers this philosophy poses or the system purporting this philosophy, is anathema to progress. The poem ends with a couplet that brings to mind Herman Melville’s enjoinder at the end of “Art,” in which he calls for a fusion of opposites within the self and between the self and the heavens. “Be somebody,” King implores of us, “be one who wrestles and make love to the dark / that is your deepest part, the uselessness of love and art.” The idea that the most beautiful things we as human beings bring to the light—beauty, love, art—are utterly useless comes as a shock, especially as it also comes at the end of a gorgeously-wrought poem serving as the collection’s prologue. The location of these lines creates the same kind of shock as the location of Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” in an Orthodox cathedral. Both performances don’t just shock: they shift. The juxtaposition of lyric and location creates a moment in which the mind bends, allowing disparate realities to coexist.

King calls upon the work of the Surrealists to illustrate this juxtaposition. In “And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur,” a poem named after a painting by Surrealist Leonora Carrington, King writes of the need to move beyond accepted meanings, “to grow branches / between worlds on the backs of nurtured equations.” She calls for us to “[s]ay another elsewhere. Open the broom, sick with sorceries.” In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour,” King speaks of a woman traveling the Lexington Avenue Line while “hitting / herself, buck up head heavy against / the number 5 train downtown.” She describes her “self-infliction” as “a cause / that brings us away from our senses.” Here, King references Arthur Rimbaud, who called for poets to transform themselves into “seers” through a “long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”

King’s collection carries out Rimbaud’s call through the velocity of its juxtapositions, racing through shifts in voice, structure, theme, and tone, sometimes within the same poem. In “Understanding the Poem,” “this world is anything but a poem” —and then, in the next line, “This world is this, this world is poem, and I am unusual today, at least.” The frenetic movement of King’s work—from popular culture to high culture, from Georgia pines to New York streets, from all-caps alert to expertly-groomed almost-sonnets—recalls the cry of Baudelaire’s soul to travel “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!” The speed and span of juxtapositions in the collection reveals what is missing from museums: movement, derangement, change.

By this dynamic derangement of our assumptions about culture, King’s museum reveals what culture really is: an ever-changing multiplicity of perspectives that cannot be carved into different, disparate wings. The narrative of culture as a series of singular, separate factions and philosophies leads to the violence of othering and violence against others. In “Perspective,” this moves beyond theory to a matter of actual life and death:

When I see two cops laughing
after one of them gets shot
because this is TV and one says
while putting pressure on the wound,
Haha, you’re going to be fine,
and the other says, I know, haha!,
as the ambulance arrives—
I know the men are white.

At the end of the poem, King asks us to wrestle with questions about this narrative, about the curation of our culture, essential for the survival of our nation and ourselves.

Who gets to see and who follows
what script? I ask my students.
Whose lines are these and by what hand
are they written?

In that 2016 New York Times interview, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova herself echoed this idea: “‘You are always in danger of being shut down,’ she said. ‘But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.’” With her work and words, King shows her readers how to join the fight.

Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books 2013). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her honors include a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. She serves as Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.