Review: Can You Sign My Tentacle?
Brandon O’Brien
64 pages
Interstellar Flight Press (2021)
Tl;dr summary: Eldritch horror meets pop culture meets Blackness meets black humor, all mixed together and with line breaks
Read this if you like: Elwin Cotman, speculative poetry, hip hop culture
I’m not nearly as well-read in poetry as I am in fiction, or even in creative non-fiction. This was part of the reason I picked up this collection—a poetry chapbook with speculative elements felt like it could be more accessible for my genre fiction sensibilities than the collections I’ve read in the past. I say this, in part, as a caveat: I’m much less confident in my opinions about poetry than when I analyze prose, especially when it comes to elements of craft.
One thing I do feel confident in saying about Can You Sign My Tentacle?, though, is that it’s a blast to read. On the big-picture level, the juxtaposition of the Cthulhu mythos with pop culture creates a fertile sandbox for imagery that’s at minimum surprising and at times hilarious. And it was unexpected in other ways, too. I was thrown off at first by the way many of the poems seem to drift in and out of narrative but after a few reads I think I’ve decided I like it—it creates a kind of untethered feeling, a dreamy-yet-anxious state that fits with the cosmic horror it’s inspired by.
This surprise carries through to the line level with phrases like “gnawing at / the bark of unsheathed pencils” or “you are just a chalice / for the ritual of melding truths”—arresting moments that made something familiar seem new, or felt like a truth that always existed but had never been put to words in quite that way. Ultimately, I think that was my biggest takeaway from this collection from a craft perspective. O’Brien’s use of surprising language keeps the reader on their toes, and because of that I wanted to keep reading to see where he would take me next.
The references to pop culture peppering this chapbook, to my reading, gave it some much-needed grounding and cohesion. In the poems that play in the Lovecraftian world, I found they would start to lose me a bit in the sections that went more conceptual and got away from that real-world tether—the language was nice, but there were definitely places that made me feel like the poem was too smart for me (which, to be fair, might have been the problem).
Ironically enough, some of my favorite works were the ones that eschewed these references and instead focused in on the mundane. “time, and time again” is a beautiful and heartbreaking rendering of grief, and the voice in “the lagahoo speaks for itself” builds a distinctive character in a very small space. That poem also sticks the landing with its last line (“picking my teeth with the memory of your name.”). Poems like these feel like just the right amount of different to serve as a kind of palate cleanser while still fitting in with the vibe and flow of the surrounding works.
Of course, leave it to the prose writer to find the only bit of prose in a poetry collection—but the “Author’s Note” in the back is also definitely worth the read. I almost wish that came before the poems instead of after them, because it gives a lot of very useful context for the works and what inspired O’Brien to write them. Then again, it was also cool to have a reason to flip back through and re-read some of the poems through that lens.
In either case, I’d definitely recommend this collection anyone who has an interest in speculative poetry, especially newcomers to the genre. The narrative feel to a lot of the poems, combined with the humor and pop culture nods, make it a very accessible gateway for speculative fiction readers and writers into the poetry side of the genres.
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