• Consider the Octopus
• Niina Pollari (bio)

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...

• 考虑章鱼
• 妮娜·波拉里（Niina Pollari）（生物）

布伦达·肖尼西（Brenda Shaughnessy）的第五个收藏品章鱼博物馆（Octopus Museum）是从一个险峻的近将来派出的。在散文诗中，叙述者详细说明了八爪鱼如何到达陆地，并从忙碌着忙于破坏一切的人类手中拉出轮子。他们利用互联网-他们的大脑非常适合它的阴谋诡计，触手善于打字-人们很快失去了控制，甚至在发生时几乎不理解，就像我们不幸的模式一样（我正在修改这一段，Facebook宣布天秤座的那一天，它进入了全球加密货币市场，这似乎是一个绝妙的主意）。

头足类动物的行为有点令人毛骨悚然（“大海中没有我”），给读者一种模糊的企业霸主的模糊感，“无数的眼睛注视着我们，……武器四面八方散发出来，对下一步的感觉。” 剩下的少数人住在指定的房子里，每周吃一罐甜菜作为一种招待，而我们过去曾经无意识地做出的决定留给了比我们聪明的人。一个孤独的档案保管员不会向任何人发出信件，就像火腿广播中唯一的恐怖电影幸存者一样，没有人能够到达曾经是听众的地方。他问道：“如果您想知道我们所有人都可以采取不同的措施来防止目前的局势，那么我对您有一个话：一切。” 当然，事实上，现在您知道了

这本书提供了黑暗的预言，但这些并非具有科幻氛围的诗歌。八爪鱼的统治不是主要的冲突。就是这样。这本书并不依赖于这个黯淡的未来的细节来使读者前进。发生的事情甚至不是重点。相反，肖尼西在混乱的反乌托邦背景下为我们提供了有关家庭事务的第一人称诗歌，尽管这个未来的某些方面令人寒心，但所留下的东西是一种挥之不去的感觉，即我们所有人都在一个完全不在我们控制范围内的系统中关心-2020年引起了轰动。叙述者是一位诗人，一位母亲和一位人类，这首诗植根于她对人类的恐惧和不安的时刻，她的孩子尽管经历了一切，却仍然如何成长和繁荣。”

值得一提的是，以某种方式，这些诗所处的世界并没有那么不可能。这是一项成就，因为接管超级智能海洋生物的想法是一个牵强的想法。但是，八爪鱼的真正目的是要成为一种遥不可及的人，他们从我们这里夺走了控制权，使一切变得陌生。章鱼及其智力和能力对我们来说几乎和实际的外星人一样陌生，在某些方面，这本书也可能是关于从空中入侵的后果。但是我们文化想象力中的外星人通常是人形的，因此被我们认为我们知道的柔软，小巧，可延展的生物推翻的想法是荒谬的，甚至是愚蠢的。我们可以想象一种高级人 但是，通过我们过去征服（或几乎不考虑）的某种东西成为二等公民的想法，对于我们的集体想象力来说是非常陌生的。章鱼甚至没有头骨。在Shaughnessy的反乌托邦中，我们受到惩罚是因为我们没有看到显而易见的事实，即情报可以形成与我们不同的形态。反乌托邦是我们所处时代的一个比喻，因为我们...