The Octopus Museum

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.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Science Fiction, Fiction, Nature, Dystopia, Contemporary

80 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2019

About the author

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Reviews

[Lark Benobi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous unique language, line by line and poem by poem. It's free verse and yet it falls into comforting familiar rhythms and never sounds false or forced. The subjects are wide ranging, really an extraordinary mix of different varieties of perfectly observed moments. The book itself is gorgeous too, a largish hardcover that's such a treat to hold (and to smell), with an ink-in-water jacket photo that seems just right for the poems inside--not completely random, and yet open to allowing a beautiful chaos in.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite poems are the ones that, when read, feel like they answer a question I didn't know I had, hadn't yet formed: the poem as simultaneous question-and-answer. And yet re-readable, and yielding a little bit more with each read.


The Idea of Others

An animal is scritching in the wall behind my bed. At first I
thought it was some kind of water crackling in a heating
pipe but what kind of water stops when you thump the
wall? I don’t mean to be mean, I mean to make it scurry off,
to send it to scritch somewhere I can’t hear.

No, I’m not afraid—it is small, by the sound of its scritch.
I’m not in Room 101, not worried about a gnarled whiskered
rodent face chewing my eyelids in my sleep. I know these
small animals, if it is an animal,

are generally afraid of big, intelligent me so far up the food
chain, capable of terrible violence if frightened. I know they
know they can never physically get me and are only after a
crumb or a drop, like everyone really.

No, I’m trying to protect my peace of mind, my inner life,
my pest-free dreams, from these unseen labors in a frenzy in
the wall behind my bed. I was going to say it drives me mad
and that is its fault, or was I going to say who am I to judge
the urges and intensities of another species?

What I’ll say instead is that I am part of the universe, privy
to sounds parallel but unreachable, and on some other level,
that I know I am alive, factually, unloving and alone.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection imagines a time in the future when our octopus overlords create a museum to remember the human species and its racism, misogyny, and total disregard for the natural world. It is a rather melancholy collection that reflects on the issues of times with a rather pessimistic. The language is often beautiful and the device of seeing ourselves through the eyes of another is illuminating. “Are Women People?” was a favorite.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a bizarre set of poems – kinda dystopian, kinda environmentalist – that imagines the world has been taken over by octopus overlords. Plastics, waste and guns have degraded human society to such an extent that going vegan and having children to spread more love around can’t make any kind of positive difference anymore. It’s too late. This is the “after” picture, but it’s more wry than bleak. “If you want to know what we all could have done differently to prevent the situation we’re in now, I have one word for you: everything.” Several poems are in the form of prose letters, or notes on an exhibition. I liked some of the kooky lines, and the gently misanthropic tone, but this was overall a little too odd for me.

A favorite passage:

“We let guns kill our children on a daily basis. Who are we to say the Octopodes did anything worse? They’re an ink species. They overwrote us. They dis[as?]sembled our guns by dissolving our systems in the middle of our own shoot-out. What we thought was gun smoke was ink cloud. The writing was never on the wall, it was in the water.”

[Deborah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am clearly in the minority, but I did not like this collection. I found the writing and thoughts disharmonious and incongruous. Octopi take over the world, because humans have destroyed the world. I agreed with the letter about the rise of plastics. Initially, I appreciated the definition of people, and then it went on ad nauseam and I wanted to toss the book aside. I wish I had.

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of an odd read. Partitioned into a few titled sections, The Octopus Museum follows course in feeling a bit too disparate. Both thematic and formal shifts are pronounced and seemingly haphazard in their integration into the larger collection here, and there are a handful of cringy, try-hard dictive choices that do not work at all. That said, this is frequently very, very beautiful and a bit near-impenetrable in the wonderful ways quality poetry often is - it's been a while since I've have to excavate, so rewardingly, individual turns of phrase and thematic spinnings. The first section, in particular, is so perfect that it largely sets up the rest of the work to disappoint (even as it remains, mostly, very good). Somewhat inconsistent and not always woven together elegantly, but with individual entries as strong as anything I've read in a while.

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my second time reading this and like the first, I find some individual lines stunning/funny/smart and the project as a whole kind of beguiling but struggle to keep up with the conceits moving through

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Collin Kavanaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having never read Shaughnessy before and picking the book because I went, “Ooo, pretty cover”, I was swept away by the depth of her work. Writing between times and realities, poetry and prose, The Octopus Museum provides both deeply personal and calculatingly alien reviews of womanhood, ecology, family, and what being human means.

[Maddie C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favourite poems: "Bakamonatako" & "Are Women People?"

[Sarah]

We were quite literally gunning for our own extinction, it now seems obvious. If not by pandemic, or self-inflicted extreme climate events, or border/nation hysteria, gleefully murderous cops and presidents and dictators, the infinite variations of pollution and cruelty and deliberate ignorance--we threw children in prison, we let them be sold--and who was "we"? we wonder,now that we are no longer us.

[Renee Delcourt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get so much anxiety when I have an unpopular opinion about a book. *Sigh* I love poetry. When I was young I was fascinated with it and how it could evoke such emotions from the reader. The thing about poetry is, it's a very special relationship between the poet and the words and the audience. This one did not click with me. The futuristic concept left me confused and continuously rereading what was on the page trying to figure out what on Earth I was supposed to be getting from it. There were times I didn't understand and just wanted to so bad, it was always just out of my reach though. For what it's worth, I don't think this was bad at all. It just wasn't a set of poems that were fore to understand and I greatly hope others can read and love them.

[Dani · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection was certainly very interesting but also very bizarre (not necessarily in a good way). It has both moments of comedy and moments of deep social commentary, and this can often be done very well together. In this book however it often feels that the humorous parts work only to cheapen the more serious ones, and so overall the book gave me just a very lukewarm feeling towards all the topics she discussed.

I think it would have been nice to read this book formatted as a short sci-fi novel, à la Slaughterhouse Five. The verse format didn’t seem to really add anything to the meaning or content of the work.

However, this author can most certainly write, and I’d be happy to read her work in the future.

[Xandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept and style with a lot of heavy themes, but it's really hard to connect with.

[Andrea Blythe · Rating 5 out of 5]

In  The Octopus Museum , Brenda Shaughnessy envisions a future in which cephalopods have taken over the world. The museum of note is not a museum of cephalopod history, but of human history, a record of our present moment interpreted by strange new rulers. Each poem in this collection if beautifully, richly contextualized, presenting a vibrant capsule of the human experience, like a carefully curated museum exhibit. This is a powerful and stunning collection, one I highly recommend reading.

"And there will be no other way to be, once this way’s gone. The last song on earth, the last jellybean. Last because nobody wanted it, or everybody sang it, till the end.

Once this day in November’s over never another. Each day nothing like the last except that it’s the last and that’s new too.

Each moment broken glasses, a covered mirror, foxed. The waste stays in place. The rest disappears. The unrest, too."

— From "No Traveler Returns," The Octopus Museum

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck Yeah!


Wow, this book got the Goodreads Choice Award. That must’ve been before Goodreads turned it’s back on poetry and stopped including it in it’s stupid awards (What did the wimpy kid do to Goodreads?)

These poems kick ass. They bruise butts. They pulverize posteriors. And, if they didn’t clean your keester, I wouldn’t want such mettle.

They’re very funny without going so far into being comedic poems like Kirby or Tate. They’re still poems proper, while not being wholly comic. They just happen to have a killer funny line here and there. That achievement is incredibly impressive.

And they’re wordy. Sometime great blocks of words similar to the abstract expressionistic quality of Ashberry’s poems. They’re so bold in their prosey and essayistic form.
It’s been a while since a new poet has wowed so much and if my God forsaken library has more, I plan to read a ton of this shit.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry can be such a wonderful read!

[La Crosse Public Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

8 Reasons to Check Out “The Octopus Museum,” Poems by Brenda Shaughnessy

8. The cover. Even if you never open the book, staring at the cover periodically (it’s actually hard not to), will be a lovely vacation for your eyes.

7. Cephalopods. They’re just cool (and smart).This book is not primarily about what humans who have studied them currently know (for that you might try The Octopus and the Orangutan by Eugene Linden), but anything with octopus in the title is worth pursuing.

6. To learn the meanings of COO, which is Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords. And CEP, which is Cephalopod Electro-Overlords, and what they become once they have accessed the ECOS, the world’s Electronic Operating Systems. But I’ll stop giving the plot away.

5. To read “When I learned to tell time I told it. I told it so; I stopped listening to what it tried to tell me: You’re already losing everything as you go and go and go.” From the poem “Gift Planet.” (Not everything in the book is from the octopus perspective.)

4. And “I don’t want to be cremated. I want to be part of earth. Space may be my original home but I only remember here.” Also from “Gift Planet.”

3. To meet Ned and Francesca, a couple participating in the “Letters from the Elders” project, who tell us such things as: “You will miss plastics” and “If you want to know what we all could have done differently to prevent the situation we’re in now, I have one word for you: everything.”

2. To explore the (Octopus Museum’s) Permanent Collection: Archive of Pre-Existing Conditions where questions such as “Are Women People?” and “How Do We Define People?” are asked.

1. Brenda Shaughnessy’s brain (and heart). After reading The Octopus Museum, you’ll likely want to find other works of hers, past and future. She was born in Okinawa, Japan, grew up in Southern California, and teaches English at Rutgers University (in New Jersey).

~Bridget, Library Clerk

[Kevin Hogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the whole of this book more than its individual parts. The overall theme of the book -- the octopoids and their domination of mankind -- the museum of The Times Before -- that resonated with me, and I thought was well-done.

The individual poems were up and down for me, hit and miss. I appreciated the playfulness of language ("To come apart we'd have to come, together; and so I tried to make you come" or "When I learned to tell time I told it. I told it so; I stopped listening to what it tried to tell me") in some of the earlier poems, but it didn't juxtapose well with the starker early statements ("Black children were killed in broad daylight, in parks and streets and in houses and churches and cars. Especially in cars. The law said it wasn't allowed, but it was expressly allowed, encouraged, and unpunished. The law said this was the law, each time a person chose to do it. These were not accidents.")

By the end ("Our Zero Waiver," "Are Women People?") the playfulness disappeared entirely, and I thought that better served the subject matter -- even as it was less memorable than the jarring juxtapositions of the first half of the book.

I don't regret reading it and thinking about it, but I'm not in a hurry to re-read and re-consider.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

From “Letter from an Elder” “Have we even understood us? We were the humans, a bafflement of evolution: most species evolve to live; we devolved to evil. Most infinitesimal specks get squashed by a much bigger foot, and maybe we’re not the only dot of a species to die of its own self-hatred, but we are rare. We were rare. The lovely planet may be salvaged with our extinction—I won’t live to know, but it would be some last light.

I cling to this because to hope for the earth to go on after we’re gone is the only kind of love left—the last good human piece of us. That some of our ether, soul, spirit, wishes, vibrations might linger here. That some form of hope can stay, with or without us” (50-51).

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think this is necessarily bad; it just wasn't for me. The language didn't really grab me, and some of the themes were too obvious and on the nose, particularly surrounding the topic of environmental destruction. It's an important issue, obviously, but I felt more like I was being lectured to about facts I already knew, which isn't what I come to poetry for. Also, even though I knew there were connecting threads between these poems, I didn't realize that there might actually be a narrative behind them until the final section, and by then, I didn't really care enough to try and go back to the earlier poems to see if they made more sense in this light.

[Eric F · Rating 2 out of 5]

In agreement with another review here : incoherent & draft like.
Pages and pages of looping wordplay - predictable and unsurprising word association.
Word salads - tossed onto the page. Clever lines throughout buried in layers of
unedited stream of conscious. Entire pages that read like discarded grocery lists -
asking the same question in rearranged form and then canceling the question out.
I found this entire collection really insufferable. Like a sketchbook of iffy ideas that somehow made it to print.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read one of Brenda Shaughnessy's books, I am infuriated by how easy she makes it look to write amazing poetry. I can't remember the last time I raced through a book of poetry like it was a thriller novel, but here it is.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“there’s no way to rest forever and then go on.”
(from “Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence”, pg. 44)

The Octopus Museum has a unique and fascinating concept that serves as a framework for the entire collection of poetry: cephalopods now rule over humankind. It has a slow start and some deeply impenetrable entries, but eventually builds to an emotionally devastating climax in the final section, with stunning poems including “Are Women People?” and “Our Family on the Run.”

Partly a commentary on social, political, and environmental issues, partly a sci-fi dystopian landscape, and partly an anthropological study of human people, The Octopus Museum asks the reader to ask themselves: what really matters?

Memorable Moments:

What an inhuman surface the sea has, always open.
(from “Identity & Community (There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’)”)

She believes the world is coming to her, not veering definitively away.
(from “I Want the World”)

What I’ll say instead is that I am part of the universe, privy to sounds parallel but / unreachable, and on some other level, that I know I am alive, factually, unloving / and alone.
(from “The Idea of Others”)

I think my room is a little depressing. Aren’t all rooms? When you could be outside / if not for the bugs, the people, the traffic, the smell, the heat, the hot rain, the / terrible sense that anything could happen to you?
(from “Notes on an Old Holiday”)

what are the most important questions, other than this one?
(from “Thinking Lessons”)

She knows where she’s going. How does she know that? She runs ahead and carries / us, her heart pounding and breaking with the weight and strain of all of us in there.
(from “Our Family on the Run”)

[Kathryn Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odd, dark, and wonderful. Shaughnessy’s table of contents starts:

“Visitor’s Guide to the OM Exhibits:
The OM has five exhibition spaces, with another three currently under construction”

She imagines a museum made by and for the octopuses that survive an ecological apocalypse, dedicated to understanding the disaster and human species that caused it. Reading Shaughnessy’s acknowledgments, I was delighted to see that she drew inspiration from one of my favorite books, Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” (thanks to my favorite Emily for her recommendation 😊) Not ashamed to say several of these poems went straight over my head. But others offered a weird and smart perspective on “humanity” as an observed subject. I especially loved:

- “Are Women People?” a definitional anthropological parsing by the “Department of Human Studies”
- “Letters from the Elders” notes from two people to unknown audiences for unknown posterity
- and “Bakamonotako” reflections on the story of an octopus from the plaque outside “the Little Sea Monster Museum Sculpture Garden”

[Nicole Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting poetry collections that I have read. The format of this was new and creative, and it did indeed feel as if I was reading a museum exhibit in book form. Among my favorites in the collection are "There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles)" and "I Want the World." Another favorite is "Notes on an Old Holiday," which ponders what it means to age. "Letters from the Elders" is an incredible piece that illustrates the damages we are making to our planet, mostly related to the use of plastic. My favorite poem was "Are Women People?," which gave me intense "The Handmaid's Tale" feelings, and really breaks down what it means to be a "person" in society. This collection really has a little bit of everything, and I immensely enjoyed it.

[Amber Whittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There’s no way to follow my own mind. My own mind is not leading. I’m unleaded. I’m gasoline.”
(No Traveler Returns)

“Anyone who practiced their art did so secretly, and we all learned not to talk about our dreams, those visions, which could be misunderstood and burned alive. We gathered on hillsides and watched the green glow, each of us exploding with poetry silent inside.”
(Irreversible Change)

“Now that I’m happy I suppose I have to break my own heart just to feel something.”
(Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence)

“How few centuries have let women be girls first, swirling as long as they wanted into their sweetness and sharpening to ripeness, only becoming women once full heavy love was their desire inside and out. Maybe one. Maybe not quite one full century.”
(Honeymoon)

[RinTinTin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t enjoyed a book of poetry this much in a long time. There are so many beautiful and interesting lines in here, and it manages to be a cohesive, conceptually interesting work that is meaningful and captivating on both micro and macro levels (the poems as individual pieces and the work as a whole). To me, it felt like a great album - the story as a whole works but I also will revisit not just the charting singles, but the b sides.

[David Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you even glance at the publisher's description of this book, you will probably understand why it would be foolish for me to even try to describe the mind-bending narrative theme of Shaughnessy's latest masterpiece. While the entire collection is fantastic, the price of purchase is more than completely justified by the six-part, seven-page work of creative brilliance that is "Are Women People?" I can't remember that last time I read a single poem that excited, thrilled, and impressed me more than that one. I'll be sharing this book a lot.

[nou · Rating 4 out of 5]

an extremely unique collection of poems that tackle the topics of enviornmental destruction, racism, and sexism. #sci-fi + #feminist pieces and i enjoyed them. i liked the concept of octopi taking over what humans once called "home" but destroyed instead. very melancholic and curious about what lies ahead of us.