Scott Beal’s Comments

Sometimes when you are going through a difficult time and you have to keep writing to get some kind of handle on what’s happening, but you’ve grown tired of your own voice, and your poems seem permanently perched on the edge of self-pity—it can be useful to ask, what would an octopus do in this situation?

And soon you may find that you have a couple dozen poems from the point of view of an octopus dealing with a marital separation, looking for answers from TNT and Wikipedia, drinking too much, and writing its OkCupid profile.

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