The Octopus Museum: Poems

By Brenda Shaughnessy

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780525655664

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Okinawan-Irish American poet who grew up in Southern California. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, she moved to New York City where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and published her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her five full-length collections include The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, in New Jersey.

Book preview

Cover for The Octopus Museum

ALSO BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

So Much Synth

Our Andromeda

Human Dark with Sugar

Interior with Sudden Joy

Book Title, The Octopus Museum, Subtitle, Poems, Author, Brenda Shaughnessy, Imprint, Knopf

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2019 by Brenda Shaughnessy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shaughnessy, Brenda, 1970– author.

Title: The octopus museum : poems / Brenda Shaughnessy.

Description: New York : Knopf, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036768 (print) | LCCN 2018038674 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655657 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525655664 (ebook)

Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.

Classification: LCC PS3569.H353 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.H353 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.54—DC23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018036768

Ebook ISBN 9780525655664

Cover photograph by Kim Keever

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

ep_prh_5.4_c0_r1

For Simone

If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.

—JAMES BALDWIN

When you lie dead, no one will remember you

For you have no share in the Muses’ roses.

—SAPPHO, Fragment 33

VISITOR'S GUIDE

TO THE OM EXHIBITS

The OM has five exhibition spaces, with another three currently under construction.

Cover

Also by Brenda Shaughnessy

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Identity & Community (There Is No I in Sea)

GALLERY OF A DREAMING SPECIES

No Traveler Returns

Gift Planet

Wellness Rituals

There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles)

SPECIAL COLLECTION: AS THEY WERE

The Home Team

Irreversible Change

Dream of Brown

I Want the World

Evening Prayer for the Humans

The Dessert I Didn't Have

TO SERVE MAN: RITUALS OF THE LATE ANTHROPOCENE COLONY

Bakamonotako

G-Bread

The Idea of Others

Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer

Home School

Notes on an Old Holiday

Map of Itself

FOUND OBJECTS/LOST SUBJECTS: A RETROSPECTIVE

Thinking Lessons

Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence

Letters from the Elders

New Time Change

Letter from an Elder

Nest

Blueberries for Cal

PERMANENT COLLECTION: ARCHIVE OF PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS

Are Women People?

Honeymoon

Our Zero Waiver

Our Family on the Run

Acknowledgments

Notes

A Note About the Author

Identity & Community (There Is No I in Sea)

I don’t want to be surrounded by people. Or even one person. But I don’t want to always be alone.

The answer is to become my own pet, hungry for plenty in a plentiful place.

There is no true solitude, only only.

At seaside, I have that familiar sense of being left out, too far to glean the secret: how go in?

What an inhuman surface the sea has, always open.

I’m too afraid to go in. I give no yes.

Full of shame, but refuse to litter ever. I pick myself up.

Wind has power. Sun has power. What is power’s source?

There’s no privacy outside. We’ve invaded it.

There is no life outside empire. All paradise is performance for people who pay.

Perhaps I’m an invader and feel I haven’t paid.

What a waste, to have lost everything in mind.

Watching three mom-like women try to go in, I’m green—I want to join them.

But they are not my women. I join them, apologizing.

They splash away from me—they’re their pod. People are alien.

I’m an unknown story, erasing myself with seawater.

There goes my honey and fog, my shoulders and legs.

What could be queerer than this queer tug-lust for what already is, who already am, but other of it?

Happens? That kind of desire anymore?

Oh I am that queer thing pulling and greener than the blue sea. I’m new with envy.

Beauty washing over itself. No reflection. No claim. Nothing to see.

If there’s anything bluer than the ocean it’s its greenness. It’s its turquoise blood, mixing me.

I was a woman alone in the sea.

Don’t tell

Reviews for The Octopus Museum

[jill.mackin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quite a different collection of poems. Some I felt deeply. Others not so much.

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd put this book on my want-to-read list so long ago that I couldn't remember anything about why I had wanted it. But I was scrolling the list while putting together a book order and the cover caught my eye — so I finally ordered it to find out.

I still don't remember where I'd heard of this, but everything about the title and premise fo the collection is such a direct hit to my interests: humans have fucked up so badly that the cephalopods have taken over — and these poems are exhibits in a museum of how/why we lost the right to govern ourselves. Filled with a parent's anxiety about environmental destruction, police brutality, consumer capitalism, all the hurts and injustices in this world we bring our children into. It's also full of longing — for opportunities missed, for moments romanticized by nostalgia, for children to have all the good stuff, for there to be no tradeoffs.

I quite loved this.

[violetbramble · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of poems about how humans are surviving on Earth as exhibits in an Octopus Museum since cephalopods took over the planet. They were mad at humans about pollution,, violence and hatred. They learned our languages and managed to take over computer systems in no time at all due to their intelligence, numerous arms and ability to adapt.
This is a strange but overall very good collection.
The book cover is the prettiest of all the books I've read this year.