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. —Lucyna Prostko Infinite Beginnings (Bright Hill Press, 2009)
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.
—Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulne
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. —Jennifer Whitaker, Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Blue Hour (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016)
