Three Hearts

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