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Literary Nonfiction. Lyric Essay. Museum Studies. Travel Writing. Anatomy of a Museum visits the Icelandic Phallological Museum in its final months under the direction of its original collector, to trace how what started as a gag gift evolved over decades into a museum known around the world.

By its own estimation, the Icelandic Phallological Museum is the only institution in the world to seek a collection of phallic specimens from every mammal species in one country—and since the recent demise of a human donor, the collection is now complete. But for all its originality, the IPM proves to be an illuminating part of both long-standing museum traditions and the particular bloom of Icelandic institutions since the 1990s, demonstrating the island's uncanny knack of turning private collections into public museums.

A. Kendra Greene began her museum career adhering text to the wall: one vinyl letter at a time. The University of Iowa gave her an MFA in Nonfiction and the opportunity to costume a giant ground sloth in its Museum of Natural History. She's been a Fulbright Grantee and a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. She is now Visiting Artist at the Dallas Museum of Art's Center for Creative Connections, where she collects oral history and reinvents museum text generated by visitors and curators alike.

Praise for Anatomy of a Museum

"One does not need to be interested in the phalluses of all the mammals in Iceland, or about geology, to find something worthwhile within the pages of these two chapbooks. They are excellent and in neither case am I propelled to suddenly read more on either subject--but I'm greatly looking forward to A. Kendra Greene's third chapbook in this series, no matter what museum she writes about."
—Emerging Writers Network Review (Read the whole review here!)

"Greene's essay captures the oddity and uniqueness you would expect from a book like this. However, she also does something notably fascinating by juxtaposing the absurdity of a penis museum with the mundane quality and everydayness of the penis itself, despite the historical tendency to figuratively (and literally, in the case of Iceland's museum) put the phallus on a pedestal."
—The Collagist Review (Read the whole review here!)

“Like a dream both feverish and freezing, Anatomy of a Museum works on the reader elementally. As the sentences unspool their disarming lyricism, carrying with them the flotsam and jetsam of strange fact and stranger interpretation, Greene allows delight to converse with revulsion, incantation with nightmare, tradition with oddity. This is the essay as mad scientist and beachcomber, building such a wonderful monster with the most unexpected, delicious, and human of found objects. It’s at turns hilarious and horrifying, nonchalant and twitchily interrogative. It’s as much about the ways in which we draw borders—both physically and ethically—as it is about an Icelandic penis museum. All of this adds up to the oddest, and most fun engagement of environmental consciousness I’ve read in some time.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer

“In the great tradition of Lawrence Weschler, Kendra Greene has written an essay about a hidden wonder of our world with the kind of ardent vim that makes us ponder why said wonder isn’t a household name. Greene’s voice is probing and hilarious; her sentences are vivacious and wild. This is the gold standard by which all future essays about Icelandic penis museums will be measured.”
—Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat

“An interesting story about one of the strangest museums in the world.”
—Jón Gnarr, former punk rocker, taxi driver, and mayor of Reykjavík