Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry

Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry features the lyrical work of 129 contributors, including poems, prose poems, art, and more, inspired by the Octopus, Squid, Cuttlefish, Chambered Nautilus, Ammonite, and Nautiloids.

This core-sample of contemporary, cephalopod-inspired writing reflects the variety of ways cephalopods intersect with our human lives and enter our creative inner worlds. The poems range in tone and style: heartbreaking, strange, reverent, funny, inspired by facts, steeped in the personal. Some poems feature speakers longing to be a cephalopod, or take on a first-person perspective: human mirror neurons firing empathetically like a squid’s reflective iridophores. Many of the narrative pieces focus on a meaningful encounter between a human and a cephalopod. All over the world, in liminal spaces between earth, air, and sea-on the shore, by a tidepool, on a dock, on a boat, while swimming, while diving, in an aquarium, in a lab-so many human beings are having a moment with a cephalopod, which gives me some hope for humanity.

-Sierra Nelson, Editor