Consider the Octopus

Brenda Shaughnessy's fifth collection The Octopus Museum is a dispatch from a precipitous near-future. In prose poems, the narrator details how octopodes arrived on land and yanked the wheel from the humans who'd been busy merrily ruining everything. They tapped into the internet—their brains perfectly suited for its machinations, their tentacles adept at typing— and people soon lost control, barely even comprehending while it happened, as is our unfortunate pattern (I'm revising this paragraph the day Facebook announced Libra, its entry into the global cryptocurrency market, which seems like a Supremely Bad Idea).

The cephalopods operate as a slightly creepy collective ("There Is No I in 'Sea'"), giving the reader a vague sense of an alienating corporate overlord, with "countless eyes watching us,... arms radiating out in all directions, feeling for what's next." The few remaining humans live in assigned houses, eating a can of beets a week as a treat and leaving the decisions we used to thoughtlessly make to those smarter than ourselves. A lone archivist sends out letters to no one—like the single horror-movie survivor on the ham radio, reaching nobody where there used to be listeners. "If you want to know what we all could have done differently to prevent the situation we're in now," he asks, "I have one word for you: everything." Of course you know it now, after the fact, now that it doesn't help at all.

The book provides a dark forecast, but these are not poems with a clinical sci-fi atmosphere. The octopodes' dominion is not the main conflict; it's simply what is. The book doesn't depend on the details of this particular bleak future to keep the reader hurtling forward. What happened isn't even really the point. Rather, Shaughnessy gives us first-person poems about domestic matters against a backdrop of confusing dystopia, and though aspects of this future are chilling, the thing that sticks is the lingering feeling that we're all careening in a system that's totally outside our control—a relatable sensation in 2020. The narrator is a poet, mother, and human being, and the poems are rooted in the moments of her human apprehension and wonderment at how her children still grow and flourish in spite of everything. "A fierce zip of pride bites my heart," says the narrator about the daughter. "She demands more because she knows there's more in the world and she believes she should have it all." This pride is the kind everyone secretly judges parents for—is your child really that extraordinary? But in an unstable system with diminishing resources, ego is what's compelling. The child's audacity to demand more pulls the parent into the future.

It's also worth saying that the world these poems are set in doesn't feel all that unlikely, somehow. This is an achievement, since the idea of supersmart sea creatures taking over is a far-fetched one. But the purpose the octopodes serve, really, is to be a kind of distant, unrelatable other that wrested control from us and turned everything unfamiliar. The octopus, and its intelligence and abilities, is almost as alien to us as an actual alien, and in some ways, this book could just as well be about the aftermath of an invasion from the sky. But the aliens of our cultural imagination are usually humanoid in shape, so the idea of being overthrown by soft, small, malleable creature we thought we knew is absurd and even silly. We can imagine a sort of Homo superior, but the idea of being made second-class citizens by something we used to subjugate (or hardly consider) is extra unfamiliar to our collective imagination. The octopus doesn't even have a skull. In Shaughnessy's dystopia, we're punished because we failed to see the obvious—that intelligence can take shapes unlike ours. The dystopia is an analog for the times we're living in, where we would let anything happen because we...