Brenda Shaughnessy’s fifth book, The Octopus Museum, portrays a world where cephalopods are the dominant species, taking over from a humanity that is fading. The collection is structured like a “Visitor’s Guide” with “five exhibition spaces” chronicling a species on the brink of extinction. The fusion of lyric poetry and dystopian themes in the book evokes a tech-heavy, desolate environment similar to Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire (2012), with Shaughnessy painting a picture of a world devoid of clear thinking due to the exhaustion of resources like air conditioning.
The poems in The Octopus Museum often shift between different time frames, capturing a sense of impending disintegration within the next few decades and the struggle to make sense of a future that seems uncertain. The speaker vacillates between speculative outcomes and the current reality, reflecting on the challenges of parenting in a world veering away from a hopeful future. Shaughnessy, a parent to a child with cerebral palsy and a young daughter to whom the book is dedicated, explores the anxieties of raising children in a world that may not be kind to them. The collection’s final poem, “Our Family on the Run,” explores the fears and uncertainties of navigating a world where even the most essential tools for survival, like a wheelchair, are at risk of being lost or compromised.
