Poem of the Week | February 02, 2015

This week we’re delighted to feature another poem from our new winter issue 37.4. Sarah Giragosian is a poet living in Hartford, CT and a lecturer in English at Bridgewater State University. Her poetry manuscript Queer Fish won the 2014 American Poetry Journal Book Prize and will be published in the summer of 2015 by Dream Horse Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Crazy horse, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter Online, among others.

 
Author’s Note:

For me, the first step in developing a more sustainable relationship with the earth and the creatures around me begins with an awareness of my own involvement in the ecological crisis. This poem reflects my own ethical crisis: how do I negotiate my identities as a human and animal; an American consumer who is complicit in the exploitation of the land and the poor; a modern subject who “misses” the earth-based knowledge of her ancestors; and a creature animated by and burdened with physical hungers and desires? In “All at Sea,” I was working with familiar metaphors: the earth as mother, the body as consumer, and combining them with atavistic memory, evolutionary theory, and myth.