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For years, I began each semester with a first-day icebreaker called the Museum of Me, where we shared personal artifacts and their backstories. Now retired from teaching, it seems fitting/safe to open a retrospective with artifacts other than the laminated baseball card to which I defaulted to explain my love of a slow game and capture a complex connection to my father.

Musée is the French word for museum and ends on a vowel, as have all the titles of my books of poetry.

That baseball card is still here in the Musée, but so are pathetic and scary dolls, lost vinyl records, a flawless essay destroyed by a cat, and a show-fault divorce decree. Each object or document tells a story. Sometimes the story is imagined with poetic license; sometimes the artifact is a symbol in a kind of wish fulfillment or fever dream.

I was inspired to explore this theme by a 2019 exhibit at the Library of Michigan, The Secret Lives of Michigan Objects, and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things. My poems are not odes, though most of the objects are praiseworthy, and now their history is no longer secret.