Author

Sarah Giragosian (2014)

Sarah Giragosian

“These poems are excerpted from my bestiary ‘Queer Fish,’ which is involved in a critique of personhood and a re-vision of queer subjectivity through the context of the creature. My poetics position the social and political implications of queer subjectivity in the same orbit as creatureliness, while highlighting the creative act (resonating on evolutionary, organic, metaphysical and aesthetic registers) that constitutes its root. There are several issues—ethical, political, philosophical, and ontological—that are at stake in this text. My poetics affirms that the creature, as both an empirical being and an object of figuration, offers opportunities for thinking outside of humanisms that impose limitations on being. As an inquiry into animal phenomenology and animal representation, the manuscript is rooted in ethical and ontological questions of how we relate to and understand the other. The creature dramatizes the alterity of the other, brings to the fore issues of justice, the mysterious nature of desire, the politics of representation and the limitations of current vocabularies for addressing intimacies between the human and animal.”
Sarah Giragosian’s poems have been published in such journals as Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter Online. Her manuscript “Queer Fish” won this year’s American Poetry Journal Book Prize and will be published by Dream Horse Press in 2015. [2014]

CONTRIBUTIONS