Love Chronicles of the Octopodes

Poet, translator, and novelist Lee (The Maze of Transparencies) shows off all her talents in this singular sci-fi novel. By a peaceful lagoon fringed with banana trees and kelp, safe and quiet in a little house with a rolltop desk and plenty of baked goods, a poet lives named Emily D. (“The letter D stands for dystopia, dysfunction, dysphagia, dyschronology, dyspnea, or dyspepsia.”) Emily was created from genetic material from a lock of hair from her namesake, Emily Dickinson—a commonplace procedure in this future world. There’s just one problem: the procedure went wrong, and this Emily D is an octopus. For no crime but the rogue nature of her genes, she has been exiled and now spends her isolated days pondering the strange and vicious world that spawned her, the gene editors who created her, and the higher power that left her a poet’s mind in the body of a voiceless cephalopod. Though the novel is light on plot, Lee’s confident, graceful, and richly poetic writing expands the strange, dreamlike narrative in all directions at once, like slow outward ripples of water. The result is a lyrical meditation on art, science, and consciousness that readers won’t soon forget. (Mar.)