Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse

by Brenda Shaughnessy

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 / 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 a mother's love.

112 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 21, 2026

About the author

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.