Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse

Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse

Shaughnessy, Brenda

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $22.00

ISBN10: 1524712884
ISBN13: 9781524712884
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: Jul 21 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.81 Depth: 9.01
Language: English
In this dystopian tale of a near-future society increasingly threatened by all-consuming AI, a scientist mother and her disabled son rebel against the corporate larceny of their selves, by an award-winning poet (Stirring. . . . Wildly inventive and sharp to an edge --Los Angeles Review of Books)

In this story of the scientist DR. MEM and KITSUNE, her nonambulatory, non-speaking son, the pair fight CORP, a mega-company developing the most powerful AI robot ever conceived. What MEM learns is that CORP seeks To give the robot something real. / What it can fake but not make: / mercy, compassion. Trust and love. That is, CORP hopes to harvest and own not just their employees' personal data but their thoughts, memories, and their sensory experiences, in order to build a robot that will contain all that is and ever was human, and replace the need for humans themselves.

This swift drama, which unfolds in a libretto/ script format, with dialogue in Shaughnessy's accessible and blistering verse, shows how MEM and her coworkers fight to save their individuality from being vacuumed up. A Greek-style chorus reflects on the state of a world where taking leave of our senses becomes a serious and quite literal threat, as MEM struggles to fulfill her singular role in fighting the high-tech of corrupt capitalism. At the center of this all-too-relevant speculative drama burns MEM's most powerful weapon against the forces of AI darkness: a mother's love.

Also from

Shaughnessy, Brenda

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All