"Sarah Giragosian's Mother Octopus is a book of love-erotic, familial, and above all, ecological. It is also a book of grief-for the speaker's mother, for the lacunae of language, for America and its many self-inflicted traumas, and especially for the dying earth. In richly musical, exquisitely lineated poems, Giragosian introduces readers to snowy owls, fig wasps, and, of course, the titular mother octopus, inviting us to slow down to the epic pace of glaciers, fossils, and stones even as we remain firmly planted in "the hour of the brutal present." Through her elegiac queer eco-poetics, Giragosian holds vigil for all that is and will be lost while still finding hope for the future embedded in each of nature's miracles; of the peacock, she writes: "Maybe we can learn to be beautiful too." If so, it will be thanks to poems like these." -Alyse Knorr, author of Ardor (2023), Mega-City Redux (2017), Copper Mother (2016), and Annotated Glass (2013) "How do these biologically and imaginatively intimate poems manage to weave reckonings with whiteness, queer love across borders, the loss of a beloved mother, human history and deep time, climate collapse, migration, and the end of empire with the worlds of wings, fins, and paws of our animal kin? I don't know, but I'll be studying to learn from the brilliant leaps and sonically stitched imagery of these haunting, beautiful poems that stun into blazes of feeling and thought. In their traverse of worlds and speakers and species, we learn the poetic magic of empathy, of metaphor, of seeing deeply into other beings and into our own animal bodies. Sarah Giragosian has written poems we need in this moment of precarious cruelty and persistent wonder." -Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal, winner of the Halcyon Prize (2022) "I need to believe in vigilant mothers," writes Sarah Giragosian. Lookout for the hidden mother, alert and secretly attending. Lookout for her protective care. The mother proliferates within Giragosian's lyrics. Mother Octopus seeks the vestiges of a hawk-eyed motherhood who survives disappearance, returning as the riddle of mercy, a salve for this age of "nuclear fallout and extinction." It is a book of possibilities, observations, and intersections, in which unexpected threads come together because we yearn and love in a world of racism, xenophobia, unfreedom, and environmental decline. Giragosian's poems are seated in a fractured space where attention to the present unfolding of disaste