This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics.
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa and raised in Southern California. She is the author of four previous poetry collections, including So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar--winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award--and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2013. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She lives in New Jersey.
*Named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by The New York
Times*
*Named a Best Book of 2019 by Publishers Weekly and Library
Journal*
"Her poetry has a lovely in-betweenness, toggling back and forth
between beauty and abruptness, humor and pathos . . . [Her poems]
offer a strikingly original meditation on what it means to be a
human with moving parts and contradictions." —Marie Myung-Ok Lee,
Oprah Daily
“Stirring . . . Wildly inventive and sharp to an edge . . . The
award-winning poet’s work catapults us into an imagined future:
octopi rule mankind after we have destroyed their oceans and our
own civilization. They keep us as museum specimens (perhaps for our
own good) . . . The museum is crowded with human mistakes—racism,
sexism, violence. But Shaughnessy’s humor offers a respite. She
presents a book of surprisingly funny post-apocalyptic poems . . .
This brilliant and tightly crafted collection acts both as a
warning and an investigation into where we are now.” —Sarah
Herrington, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Like octopuses, Shaughnessy's poems manage to be both fleshy and
cerebral, concerned with a self that breathes through fragile skin.
She offers up these beautiful innards through her words; they twist
agony into acceptance only to return and be picked apart again, a
recognizable cycle of motherhood and womanhood—humanhood, depending
on your definition." —Nikki Shaner-Bradford, The Paris Review
“In a heightened conversational tone, utterly accessible yet with a
punch of ideas so swift and rich as to make multiple readings a
necessary pleasure, this new collection investigates identity,
human hunger for what we maybe can’t have, and how we see and feel
the world differently when we have children.” —Library Journal
(Best Books 2019)
“Shaughnessy can write the kind of line that is confusing in its
beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, [lines] that can be read
and reread without exhausting their potential meaning.” —Elisa
Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review
"An immersive tour of social and ecological calamities, as well as
an elegy for the present." —Matthew Johnstone, BookPage
"A highly original look at the world as it is today and the dangers
we seem intent on inflicting upon ourselves . . . Shaughnessy
writes startling poems that are both intellectually wide-ranging
and emotionally riveting." —Ginny Lowe Connors, New York Journal of
Books
“Part sci-fi and part reality, The Octopus Museum is as unsettling
as it is hypnotic. The poems take you into an alternate reality
where, because of humanity’s shortcomings, cephalopods rule the
earth. Brimming with maternal anxiety, scathing humor, and enduring
terror, these poems are nothing short of a call to action.” —Logan
Voss, Fupping
"Musical, expressive lines that triumph in their complexity and
grace . . . With an unparalleled ear for language, Shaughnessy
excels at making the tragic transcendent." —Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"A breakthrough book . . . Ambitious in concept and structure."
—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
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