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by Sarah Rose Giragosian (Author)
The death spiral is a courtship ritual among raptors. Locking talons in mid-air, they cartwheel toward earth, risking death until determining when (or if) to let go. If they survive the stunt, they validate the fitness of their potential mate. If not, the test can end in a fatal collision with the earth. Think of it as the ultimate first date. Written during the years of the Trump era, The Death Spiral is a conceit for our fraught political times and the sense of precarity that the poet experienced as a queer woman married to an immigrant. Like the eagles in their precarious death dance, we are mutually dependent upon one another, entangled, and yet survival in this age, the Anthropocene, may be a practice of letting go, learning a position to one another that is less rapacious. The Death Spiral is part-love letter, part-death notice to the earth and its creatures.
Author Biography
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited Virginia Konchan. Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize, is forthcoming from Middle Creek Press. Sarah's writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
