When a poet places their colleagues at the Deep-Sea Research Centre under the microscope, the scientists tasked with exploring the mysteries of the deep become the observed.

You are what you see. The deep sea – home of the uncanny vampire squid – is fathomless and mysterious, but so too are the scientists who observe the creatures of the deep.

Full of wry wit and ironic scrutiny, Vampire Squid examines the relationship between humans and the deep sea as the poet places their colleagues under the microscope to draw attention not only to the teeming life beneath the sea, but the distinctive ways that oceanographer, geoscientist, taxonomist, marine biologist and geneticist interpret the same world through very different eyes.