Today's poem is "When the Horseshoe Crab Grieves"
from Queer Fish
Sarah Giragosian
's poems have appeared in such journals as
Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Baltimore Review, and The Missouri Review,
among others. She teaches in the department of Writing and
Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY.
Other poems by Sarah Giragosian in Verse Daily:
Books by Sarah Giragosian:
Other poems on the web by Sarah Giragosian:
Sarah Giragosian on Facebook.
About Queer Fish:
"Queer Fish is an original and daring book, crossing the boundaries between
human and animal realms to transport us into the world of natural wonders
where the poetry of deeply felt sensory experience is the key to inner truth.
In this book of stunning metamorphoses, written with both precision and
exuberant abundance, the conventional hierarchies disappear, and we are
called upon to rejoice in our affinities with a horseshoe crab, an anglerfish,
a condor, a tortoise, a damselfly, and squid. Intricately crafted and shrewdly
observed, her poetry is participatory, coaxing readers to acknowledge their
potential for both love and empathy: 'tonight I wake as an anglerfish, /
ringing my world with light' ('The Anglerfish Finds her Muse') and for
hate and destruction: 'We are all poison and poisoned / slick with oil /
and its rings of dark pearl' ('When a Horseshoe Crab Grieves'). In this
anti-fable world, animals discard their merely symbolic nature and become
true agents, inviting us, human creatures, into dialogue and communion
with them. These encounters redefine the poetics of Eros, as the scientific
blends with the magical, the mundane with the eccentric, and a human lover
can inhabit the 'hermaphroditic soul / of love' or become 'the long-eared
hedgehog girl.' The poet, like 'The Decorator Crab,' is an eclectic collector
of nature's ordinary miracles, but is also a creature being collected by other
creatures – immortalized, loved and accused by the chorus of voices that
usher us into the world of mysterious and joyful correspondences between
human and nonhuman."
"With curiosity and wonder, Sarah Giragosian deftly crafts enchanting lyrics
of menageries and memories, of mimic octopi and ostriches. Marianne
Moore allegorized through pangolins and paper nautiluses. Elizabeth
Bishop interrupted the world in the strange gaze of a seal staring up from
the bay, near the fish houses. Whether recalling girlhood memories of snails
mating in the woods or imagining swimming beneath Portuguese men of
war's tentacles, Queer Fish pays loving attention to the honest signals all of
life emits. These poems double for those calls, drawing us outside ourselves
toward queerer imaginaries and more expansive intimacies."
"PressVisceral, physical, and powerful, Sarah Giragosian's poems unmoor us in landscapes both otherworldly and familiar, as we inhabit the fierce brains and bodies of other creatures and of those who admire them. Giragosian's language is lush, uncanny, haunting. Queer Fish is a book of passions intellectual and animal, crafted by a poet of unmatched compassion and talent."
March 22, 2012: "The Decorator Crab," "bedecked with seaweed, polyps, knobs, and buds..."
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"Family History"
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"To the Meerkat"
"Wasp Nest"
"The Crocodiles He Keeps"
"Divided Creatures and the Music of Form"
"Lonesome George: the last member of the Chelonoidis abingdoni species (circa 1912- 2012)"
Lucyna Prostko
Eric Keenaghan
Jennifer Whitaker
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