The Octopus Museum: Poems [Paperback]

Now in paperback, 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 as much by Brenda Shaughnessy's worst fears as a mother as they are by her superb craft as a poet, 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 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.*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 humlÓÏ