Wonder Cabinet

A wonder cabinet (also known as a cabinet of curiosities) is a collection of interesting and unusual objects, traditionally housed in a private study-a "cabinet" in the original sense of the word-or, in the case of humbler collections, sometimes displayed in a single piece of furniture. Wonder cabinets date back to 16th century Europe, where amassing and exhibiting peculiar specimens from the natural world, along with fascinating man-made artifacts, became popular with rulers, aristocrats, merchants, and early practitioners of science, spreading a taste for the marvelous throughout Western culture and laying the groundwork for modern museums.

But must our sense of wonder depend solely upon items we might place in a display case? What if we allowed our capacity for wonder to inform our life as a whole? This is the question Ryan Mills explores in his new collection of poems, Wonder Cabinet. By mining the details of daily life, especially family life, and also by attending to major life events such as marriage and childbirth, the diagnosis of a loved one's serious illness and the onset of aging, Mills sets out to show us that, when viewed with proper insight, the world we inhabit every day, the kinds of shared and sometimes difficult human experiences that affect us all, even the games and stories with which we entertain our children, are as imbued with mystery as a broken-open geode.

About the Author

Ryan Mills was born in Jasper, Indiana, in 1979. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, he designed his own major, which combined creative writing with the study of religion and mythology. He graduated summa cum laude in 2002. His first book of poems, Squaring the Circle, was published by RoseDog Books in 2011. A revised and expanded edition of Squaring the Circle was subsequently published by RoseDog Books in 2017.

Ryan lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Courtney, and his son, Soren.