A powerful debut poetry chapbook from Li Zhuang.
Runner-up for Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest. Selected by Chen Chen
Available March 4th
Li Zhuang is a PhD candidate of Creative Writing at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Madison Review, and The Collapsar, etc. Li is a finalist for the 2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (judged by Brandon Som) and a runner-up for Grist’s ProForma contest (judged by Beth Ann Fennelly). Li is also the winner of the 2025 SAMLA Graduate Student Creative Writing Award.
Praise for But Octopi Don’t Sing:
Praise for But Octopi Don’t Sing
Queering form, Buddhism, the moon, and MBTI tests, Li Zhuang’s poems are gorgeous maximalist monsters. They are many-armed, weirdly charming, utterly disarming. In this latest landscape of repression and societal collapse, this deceptively small collection will lift you from complacency and despair, will teach you to “let the most vulnerable/ part of your body decide.” After all, what is a monster but that which dares to survive—and to take booming pleasure in it?
—Chen Chen, Author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Li Zhuang’s But Octopi Don’t Sing are poems of self-discovery and, at times, self-defense, but they are also poems of passion, understanding, and hard-won love. Rarely do we encounter a collection with as much energy combined with as much precision, with as much formal inventiveness combined with such vulnerability, as when she asks her titular, three-hearted octopus, “How many hearts do you need / to hold your endless grief?” Her voice is distinctive and her aim true. Zhuang’s But Octopi Don’t Sing is a remarkable debut and marks the arrival of an exciting new poet
—James Kimbrell, Author of The Law of Truly Large Numbers: Poems
Li Zhuang’s But Octopi Don’t Sing is at once funny and meditative, unflinchingly personal yet historically resonant. Growing up in China and later studying in the U.S., Zhuang interrogates the complexities of transnational living by placing her speakers in diverse settings, real or imagined: the contemporary U.S. after COVID-19, a temple where her mother prays for her well-being, or the Tang Dynasty court where a famous courtier of Empress Wu Zetian questions her own sexuality. Whether speaking to an octopus or imagining a romance with a quantum lover, Zhuang’s lyricism remains strikingly honest, illuminating how the poet—or anyone—might endure social, historical, and political constraints. “I am a river tugged/from both ends,” she writes, noting the contradiction in her existence. And with wit: “If you hold your chin high enough,/tears would never fall.//How brilliant it is!/To single-handedly/destroy the waves.”
—Weijia Pan, Author of Motherlands
But Octopi Don’t Sing confronts the fractures of language, diaspora, and family with humor, fury, and grace. Charting the metamorphoses of womanhood, queerness, and migration. Li Zhuang writes from the chasm between two languages, making their discrepancies shimmer with new life. Many of these poems turn on misreading and mistranslation—on the strange beauty of misunderstanding signs and symbols across cultures. Zhuang transforms this act of “mistaking” into a generative center of imagination, a site where error becomes art, and language bends toward revelation—“Z is my last name zigzagging/ on your wrists./ Bend me backward/ and make me/ an arch/ of language.” But Octopi Don’t Sing is a wonderful, strange chapbook—one in which tenderness has tentacles.
—Shangyang Fang, Author of Burying the Mountain
Li Zhuang’s But Octopi Don’t Sing is both playful and piercing. It is a chapbook that moves its many arms through the tangled waters of time, language, and desire. Growing up in China, studying in the United States, Zhuang’s writing bridges the chasm between cultures, navigating the cartography of womanhood, queerness, and migration. Her poems create a landscape of modern temples where a mother prays for her daughter’s safety, and the court of the Tang Dynasty is resurrected with modern wit. Across constantly moving landscapes of society and desire, Zhuang explores what it means to live transnationally—“a river tugged/ from both ends.”
These poems revel in nuance and language, transforming mistranslations and misinterpretations into art. Zhuang’s poems are startling, honest, and wry. Humor and fury coexist with tenderness and vulnerability, all a testament to endurance. In this era of uncertainty, But Octopi Don’t Sing offers a clear, disarming voice that embraces what is different and defiantly yet fiercely alive. Yet teaches us how to remain soft and let “the most vulnerable/ part of your body decide.”
