The Octopus Museum: Poems - Hardcover

Brenda Shaughnessy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525655654 ISBN 13: 9780525655657

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

Synopsis

This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics.

Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy's craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children (car accidents, falling from a tree) is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.

About this title

Review:

Praise for The Octopus Museum

"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

"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

About the Author:

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of four books of poetry, 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 Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2013. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She lives in New Jersey.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0525655654
• ISBN 13: 9780525655657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96