Contemporary Authors

• The Taxidermist's Cut ( poetry) Four Way Books (New York, NY), 2016
• The Cowherd's Son ( poetry) Tupelo Press (North Adams, MA), 2017

1. The cowherd's son LCCN 2017000643 Type of material Book Personal name Mohabir, Rajiv, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The cowherd's son / Rajiv Mohabir. Edition First paperback edition. Published/Produced North Adams, Massachusetts : Tupelo Press, 2017. Description 99 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781936797967 (pbk. original : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O376 A6 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The taxidermist's cut LCCN 2015028577 Type of material Book Personal name Mohabir, Rajiv, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The taxidermist's cut / Rajiv Mohabir. Published/Produced Tribeca : Four Way Books, [2016] Description 98 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781935536727 (softcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O376 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Rajiv Mohabir - http://www.rajivmohabir.com/about

  RAJIV MOHABIR
  Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his book entitled The Taxidermistʻs Cut (Spring 2016), Rajiv Mohabir's first collection is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School (where he was the Kundiman Fellow), and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His second manuscript The Cowherd’s Son won the 2015 Kundiman Prize (Tupelo Press in May 2017). He was also awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara, published originally in 1916. His translations of this text is forthcoming from Kaya Press in 2018.

  _MG_7708-6.jpg
  His poem "Ancestor" was chosen by Philip Metres for the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award. His poems also received the 2015 Editor's Choice Award from Bamboo Ridge Journal and the 2014 Academy of American Poet’s Prize for the University of Hawai‘i. His poem "Dove" appears in Best American Poetry 2015. Other poems and translations appear in journals such as Quarterly West, Guernica, The Collagist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, small axe, The Asian American Literary Review, Great River Review, and PANK. He has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.

  Winner of the inaugural chapbook prize by Ghostbird Press for Acoustic Trauma, he is the author of three other multilingual chapbooks: Thunder in the Courtyad: Kajari Poems, A Veil You’ll Cast Aside, na mash me bone, and na bad-eye me.

  Rajiv holds a BA from the University of Florida in religious studies, an MSEd in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Long Island University, Brooklyn, and an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of Ozone Park Literary Journal. While in New York working as a public school teacher, Rajiv also produced the nationally broadcast radio show KAVIhouse on JusPunjabi (2012-2013). He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i and is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry in the Department of English at Auburn University.

• Auburn University - http://cla.auburn.edu/english/people/professorial-faculty/rajiv-mohabir/

  Rajiv Mohabir
  Rajiv Mohabir Assistant Professor
  9004 Haley Center
  (334) 844-9004
  prm0021@auburn.edu
  Office Hours
  Tuesday 11:15-12:15pm, 2-3pm, & by appt.
  Thursday 11:15-12:15pm, 2-3pm, & by appt.
  Profile
  Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry). In 2015 he was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award as well as a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara. His poems, translations, and essays appear or in Poetry, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, The Offing, Jacket2, and Asymptote. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Read more about him at www.rajivmohabir.com.

• Connotation Press - https://www.connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/july-2015/2600-rajiv-mohabir-poetry

  Rajiv Mohabir - Poetry
  MohabirRajivRajiv Mohabir received the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring, 2016), the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award, the Kundiman Prize for The Cowherd’s Son, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His honors include fellowships from the Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal.

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  Rajiv Mohabir interview with John Hoppenthaler

  First, Rajiv, allow me to congratulate you on a significant, even astonishing run of great poetry news! During the past several years, you’ve received the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for your first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring, 2016); the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award; the 2015 Kundiman Prize for The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press); and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. You’ve also been working on your dissertation project which I imagine will amount to your third full manuscript of poems. That’s quite a roll. As you work toward finishing up your PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i, dude, you’re pretty set up! Are you thinking much about how you can bring these achievements to bear as you move beyond the PhD?

  Thank you! It all feels so surreal. I can hear the voice of Nicole Cooley advising me at Queens, “Someone wins these prizes, you may as well submit.” I just never thought that this would all come to fruition. I mean, the academy seems filled with so many beautiful voices; I am in disbelief that mine might actually contribute.

  My hope in studying poetry and translation has been to cultivate a practice of writing where I allow myself the time and energy to make poems. I worked as a teacher in the New York City public schools and thought that it in order to be a decent teacher I needed to have a living passion in my life—that’s when I decided to apply for the MFA at Queens College. This turned out to be my first step into that direction: making poetry a focus in my life. It’s taken a long time to make poems that people want to read, and I am still learning how to do so.

  I eventually left the Department of Education to pursue my PhD in Hawai‘i, as it’s a PhD in English with a creative dissertation. There is also a Hindi program here, which I thought would be invaluable to my desire to translate from and write in Hindi and Bhojpuri. It turned out to be the perfect place to further my study into intersections of coloniality and identity.

  As for my goals after my PhD is completed, I would like to chase the White Whale of a tenure track position at a university teaching creative writing, translation, queer and postcolonial literatures. The fun bit about it all is that I’ve already allowed myself complete indulgence into my scariest of hauntings and greatest of joys.

  We’re thrilled to be able to include poems from all three of these manuscripts. It seems clear that, like Natasha Trethewey, say, one of your big themes has to do with identity, and it’s complicated. Can you talk about this theme in your work, generally, as well as other themes we can see in your work and give us a sense as to what you see that might distinguish between these three manuscripts of poetry, perhaps with specific references to the poems featured here?

  I remember I once asked Kimiko Hahn if she thought it was boring that I wrote about identity so much. She said “You’re a gay, South Asian from the Caribbean—why would you ever stop? It’s fabulous.” I took her words as “permission” to write about my identities.

  What separates the first two manuscripts is scope. The Taxidermist’s Cut is a book that charts the way that violence is internalized and how the speaker enacts various violences upon himself. It deals with a cultural identity of being diasporic, queer, and in a Central Florida that lacked diversity. I’ve taken books on taxidermy, shredded them, and made new poems from their fragments of silken fur. The poem “Ritual” focuses on the speaker’s enacting this violence through self-harm and sexuality.

  As in the poem “Canis lupus lupus,” I write about another form of a queer identity that expands past “diaspora” and into legibility in American patterns of racialization. What I mean here is that “Indians”—immigrants and their children from the subcontinent didn’t recognize my family as “Indian” since we’ve been living outside of India for at least 120 years. That’s five generations. The notion of what makes an “Indian” has changed dramatically since 1890. National borders shifted, new ethnicities were created and some, destroyed. As someone who is inter-caste, and coming from an inter-caste culture where notions of purity are challenged daily, my “new-ness” also queers notions of wholeness.

  The Cowherd’s Son looks more directly at my caste identities, the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, and familial relationships that are complicated more than the personal, but are metonymic for a cultural belonging. In the poem “Blind Man’s Whist” I hope to illustrate a history into diaspora that centers Indian contracted labor. The original agreement was after working the sugar cane fields for five years the British would return the workers to India—yet this promise became too expensive to uphold. People remained in the colony and were forced (again) to hack out a new existence.

  Of my other projects I can say my MFA thesis was an altogether separate—and I say project here deliberately, knowing that it’s kind of a bad word in the word of poetry and books of poems. I took to the streets of Richmond Hills, the site of an Indo-Caribbean community, and developed a form of poem that suits my cultural landscape.

  My dissertation will be a collection of poems that charts the historical journey of queer indentured laborers who traveled from India to Guyana as well as the personal: my own journey through cultural identities and surviving homophobias. I hope to put into conversation queer migration under Indian indenture (1838-1917), the whaling industry, and contemporary homophobic and racist violences.

  The poem “Balaenoptera musculus musculus” speaks of spirituality—how sometimes we don’t know the mechanics of song, and how they are not important when we realize that we are vehicles for music. I feel like writing about spirituality is somewhat of a taboo, but here I do it trans-species-ly. I am interested in the languages we don’t have access to but can feel nonetheless.

  I was browsing through a profile of you from your days in the Queens College MFA program, and your young life represents as wildly diverse and eclectic. The piece reveals you, in that timeframe, as a “poet, fifth-grade teacher, graduate student, dancer, adventurous cook, and creator of videos,” as a person for whom “Languages and sacred stories, rivers and oceans, the Diaspora of [your] Christian/Hindu family, and the migration of humpback whales” are fascinating, that you were born in London of artistic Guyanese-Indian parents, and grew up in Queens, NY, Niagara Falls, and central Florida. And now you live in Hawai`i, where, as you state on your web page, you write “about colonial era anti-sodomy laws, plastic, and humpback whales.” You have as rich a stew of landscape and cultural reference from which to draw as anyone. I imagine that you might be able to attribute your prolificacy to this wealth of experience? How does this all manifest itself in your poetry? Would you say that your poetry finds life within the confluence of one or more of these interests?

  I like the many places I can claim to have been influenced by in my migration story. It’s taken a long time for me to see beauty in my particular assemblages of identities. When I was younger I wanted an uncomplicated narrative, something easy and accessible so others could read me like a text. It was after I stopped praying to be white, to fit the norm, that I was able to envision life by using many eyes. My background has everything to do with the way I make sense of the world. I think that writing is a way I could allow for these multiple identities to exist together.

  I am able to allow for complications in my life by not having to hold them all inside. After they are written down and put together, a new dialogue emerges—one of upheaval and unity. Having them down on paper as poems allows for this tension of multiple ways of seeing things. In this way the poems may or may not cohere outside of my having written them, or maybe that’s enough—to be wrought from the same queer pool of raw materials.

  I think of Lord Shiva in this moment. He is the lord of paradoxes and he holds them in his throat. Since I’m not even close to being a metaphor for a god, I blue the paper with the things I can and can’t be. In the samsara, the world, of the poem anything is permissible—time and space don’t have the same materiality; I am able to collapse Varanasi (India), Crabwood Creek (Guyana), London (England and Canada), and New York into one place: that of my body.

  Living and writing in Hawai‘i has definitely started to shape the way I engage with notions of occupation and coloniality. It’s a place that’s illegally occupied by the United States and native Hawaiians are under constant threat of erasure—both physical and epistemological. In this situation I am able to harmonize my familial history of cultural exploitation and erasure to what is happening in Hawai‘i. I like to think of ways to ally, to fight for what is right. I am drawn to the humpback whale as it is both migratory and musical, once highly endangered. It sings its songs while travelling over 5,160 miles each year. It survives.

  As if this were not enough output, you have also distinguished yourself as a translator, receiving a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for your translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara. Published in 1916, this collection of folksongs is the only known literary work to be written by an indentured Indo-Caribbean writer. What drew you to this project, and how has the process of translating affected (if at all) your own poetry?

  I see works of Indo-Caribbean music as one of my poetic influences. Lalbihari Sharma is a poetic ancestor. I was made aware of this text by Gaiutra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. She approached me and asked if I would be interested in translating this collection of Phaags, or chautal songs. I jumped at the chance. This was an opportunity for me to work with a collection of poems that was written during the Indo-Caribbean origin story.

  I first started translating my Aji’s (my father’s mother’s) Guyanese Bhojpuri folksongs into English as an anthropological exercise in my undergraduate studies. I didn’t see the problem with trying to make her words into “artifacts” until I thought about the velocity that they could achieve if my translations were infused with the same vim as poetry. That’s when I started thinking about the text of Caribbean Hindi folksongs as living poems. These poems tell of life in my Aji’s generation, shifting ideologies and worldviews; illuminating the process of Creolization, surviving colonialism and remaining whole.

  Translation is no longer an act of synonym replacement; it becomes a migration of worldview from one language to another. Since my parents, my brother and sister, and my niece and nephews do not speak Hindi or Bhojpuri (except for the bad words), I see my role as a translator not as an academic or a poet, but a custodian, as a caretaker. I want to link my future to my past. This is a personal stake with real life implications of cultural erasure. If I allow my generation to forget our stories (I have had the luck and resources to be able to relearn my languages) then I have not been a good steward.

  Sharma’s work was the first that was published as a text and the metaphors that he uses for labor, loss, and longing have never been foreign to me. In fact, I see much of the same poetic enduring today in contemporary chutney music. In this way I see myself in this artistic and poetic trajectory. I have been educated in the West and have had to relearn Bhojpuri and Hindi yet find my acts of personal decolonization (writing poems) to be a way to reestablish a connection with and to start speaking to my ancestors. We speak from different times and places, yet my physical body is made of their bones and tissue.

  Because my wife, Christy, is an elementary school ESL teacher, I’d be interested to know more about your experiences as a fifth grade ESL school teacher in Corona, Queens. What brought you to teaching there, and is it something you’d consider doing again? Did you find yourself able to bring poetry to the process, and did the teaching have any influence on your work as a poet and/or translator?

  Teaching ESL was a way that I wanted to undo the harm of English language done to my own family. I worked in Bushwick, BK, Corona and Richmond Hill, Queens during my seven years as a public school teacher. I was a New York City Teach Fellow from 2006-2008. I heard about this program from a friend of mine who was an immigrant rights activist in Massachusetts and since I wanted to do some politically active work I decided to apply. Since New York is one of, if not the most, linguistically diverse places in the world I thought being there to be essential.

  Poetry found its way into my English lessons for sure. When I taught fifth grade (2008-2011) my class organized a poetry slam that acted as test preparation for the state exams. The state exams suck the souls out of children. They are high stakes and simply unfair and awful. We would study poetic devices and use them to talk about immigration and other topics close to the hearts of the students.

  Because of this program’s efficacy and high student engagement, the administration asked me to do a workshop for the teachers to show them ways to teach poetry. I made a handout about helpful strategies that they could take home and read on their own time. Instead, I decided to use the instructional time to make the teachers experience writing poetry of their own, so that if the experience proved moving they would understand its inherent power. This proved a success! This is when I discovered that not only do I like to write poetry, I also love to teach it.

  You have revealed that “When walking the beach with my nephew, I am able to summon sea creatures.” An extraordinary superpower, to be sure, and it seems that, for you as for me, the beach is a special place where you are able to summon poetry along with metaphorical sea creatures. What is it about the shore that spurs your work, this magic?

  I grew up frequenting the beach and find myself always drawn to the water. I seek it out, or it seeks me out. Because of this, I am really good at spotting animals like whales, dolphins, rays, sharks, manatee, etc. Like being at the beach with my nephews and niece, Taylor, Devin, and Lily, we know that in looking for these animals one must exercise extraordinary patience. It’s kind of like writing a poem. It takes time for the poem to breach the surface, to reveal its beautiful brown skin to the writer. And when it does I am present in my body. This is magic, this being present.

  I could say that the ocean represents all things that are both unknown and known subconsciously, or that it is the originator of life—the closest physical manifestation of the creator god. I could say that I never feel more whole than when I am in the ocean, having grown up by water, having my entire migration story happen through crossing seas. I could say the sea is the site of trauma and great blessing. I could say something about how we are made up of saline.

  Everything I could say about the ocean I could say for poetry too.

  Last words are yours! What would you like to leave us thinking about?

  In my mind writing and translating are acts of survival—not just of keeping a poetic in tact, but a way to keep living. There’s a Bhojpuri folksong for every event in one’s life. I want to re-cycle the songs and have them incarnate in my own lived experiences. It’s my version of singing down the future: taking the words of my ancestors and having them sing, now in a different idiom.

  I often wonder what my ancestors would think of my life, how far removed I am from what they knew. I live in the most remote island chain in the world—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I can read and write, something relatively new in my family: my dad’s generation being the first in his family to read and write and my grandparents on my mother’s side.

  Would they recognize me if they read my writing? Would they recognize themselves? I hope these poems and translations to be way of no longer remaining strangers to one another despite sharing a genes. I’ve started a project of retranslating East Indian protest songs from Guyana back into Bhojpuri and Hindi. The original versions of the songs were lost to the person that collected them, and all that remains is the English translations.

  Even relearning these songs is a journey through my complete migration history. I have to sail from an English remnant back into Hindi and Bhojpuri—an act similar to tracing my genealogy.

  ---------

  Canis lupus lupus

  “…every culture is first and foremost national.”
  –The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon

  Once an India-man in Florida said,
  Guyanese aren’t real Indians.
  You stand before a mirror,

  what glass won’t distort
  your image? Even the eye’s lens
  twists coyotes into wolves

  one hundred twenty-five years
  outside the desh. Orientalists
  well documented the grey wolf

  for associations with affluence.
  Do you expect others to see
  nuances speckling your pelt when

  your coolie mother can’t tell
  Gujarati from Punjabi? Put on
  your janitor coat and some

  think you a doctor. Coming
  to the States, your own parents
  didn’t have the right papers, caste,

  or ship passes. You are a coyote
  in wolf’s clothes. Your father warns,
  Desis will reject you; the temple

  pack will extirpate the untouchable.
  To them West Indian means
  palaces, rubies, samosas; to your

  Chuluota pelt it’s Aji’s gold
  teeth, kitchen Creole, two spoons
  of ice-cream in your sweet rice.

  Ritual

  You’re a pro at peripheral. Years after
  you are cities apart,

  you meet up your first boyfriend
  for coffee and gin. He convinces you

  to park in the Methodist’s lot,
  to undo your jeans. You spit out

  teenage sacrament on the pavement. Watch
  the lips close. Repeat. Repeat.

  It goes like this:
  you will hate yourself until

  you push your arms through
  your orange long-sleeve

  and withdraw the marble box
  from the dark. Inside is a sword.

  Inside is a mantra that calls
  blood to the skin

  you never asked for. Repeat.
  Repeat. Watch

  it cover over, the lips of your arm
  closing. Repeat.

  In the bar you drown
  in scotch haze;

  the man opposite you will blaze
  in your throat when his denim

  and leather are a nest
  calling birds to their weaving:

  from the pile on your floorboards.
  You no longer cut as a child cuts.

  It’s morning and you swallow
  the sun’s fever but not its light.

  Outside your brother’s pastor rains brimstone:
  your tongue will rot

  in your mouth; flames
  will crack your bones into Psalms.

  It’s Christmas. It’s polarity:
  a chasm within

  so large you don’t remember
  what’s divided.

  Blind Man’s Whist

  Play your hand of loss, in fact,
  your deck was glass, now
  it’s in slivers. Any cutlass deal

  will cost an eye. Think of it:
  your color is the One-eyed Jack’s,
  either a spade or red-skinned

  after the sun’s molten gold casts
  you into a new caste. You are sick
  of being broken, every metaphor

  for you is one of soldered pieces,
  a wistful colony-memory of a once
  promised return: a 19th century

  pirate game you learned in the dark,
  taught by your father: suicidal
  king wagering your mother’s gold

  teeth for a trick and re-signs
  an indenture contract, forfeits
  return passage for this Skeldon paddy field.

  The gamble is you never see
  your own assets, you try to drown
  yourself in rum, stuffing English

  into your mouth and still allow
  magistrates to fill you with silence.
  Guyana was called El Dorado

  because of the promise of gold,
  but it was empty. El Dorado
  is a promise of rum, that soon

  your hand will trump all others,
  and you will clear the table with one
  knock from your arm and pull

  your brothers up to dance while one
  selects a chantey from the jukebox
  hacking a settlement in the corner.

  Mantra

  O gods of ash,
  I have found you and am not of you.

  This mask of clay will smash
  against the river stones and I will sail
  Snow Moon into the pollution of years

  of broken sutras, a wreckage
  of browned marigolds at the throats of used up
  idols and burnt out clay lamps.

  O gods of brass. O gods of burns
  then sandalwood paste,

  Hear me. I was once as you are. Fixed
  to a base or brushed in camel hair,
  lips parted, prayers caught
  as vireos smoldering in my throat.

  O gods of today, of broken things,
  some things misplaced where they belong;
  gristle and shell fall away.

  A macaw flies from its cage
  in midtown Manhattan, unaccustomed to sky:
  a rainbow streak.

  Fading and sharpening link
  into steady raga. A man pours
  oil into wine from the beak of his askos.

  My own joy: a sun in my chest.

  O clay gods, o gods of phase,
  may you singe your own sky.

  Balaenoptera musculus musculus

  Earth’s biggest animal shares
  its nomenclature with the mouse,

  which means their every note
  gives muscular song, wails, a small notion

  here weighing one hundred
  and seventy tons, which means

  this moves you. I tell you
  this clay dome bears a sea of light

  where a simple pinprick and a nova bursts,
  swallowing any shadow or chimera.

  It’s pneumatically driven
  membrane vibrations oscillate

  air from larynx to cranial sinuses
  to orchestrate a score. But

  the question remains, why call out
  without phonic lips, the staff

  and ledger lines blank, free of treble?
  You are built for music: a viola strung

  with fiber and filament. It’s how blue whales
  voice the loudest song, not from deep

  muscle, but from sliding breath:
  a second nature that echoes blues, grace-

  noting from extinction to a choral body.

• The Collagist - http://thecollagist.com/collagist-blog/2015/4/22/in-the-ink-of-night-an-interview-with-rajiv-mohabir.html

  "In the Ink of Night": An Interview with Rajiv Mohabir
  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 2015 AT 12:23PM
  Winner of the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring 2016), Rajiv Mohabir received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Great River Review, PANK, and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently he is pursuing a PhDn English from the University of Hawai`i.

  His poems, "Underwater Acoustics" and "Overfished," appeared in Issue of Sixty-Eight of The Collagist.

  Here, he speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about the value of space in a poem, the use of tension between images, and the humpback song.

  The stanzas vary in length, highlighting and framing the most vivid images. How did you work form into content, or vise versa?

  The form of this poem happened as I was writing it. Or should I say it revealed itself though breath constraint?

  It was a subconscious processing of images on my part—how to allow for the maximum realization? I have a hard time reading couplets when I write them because their evenness is distracting. I’ve tried to stop writing them for now unless a poem begs for them. This is supposed to be an underwater realization.

  As a reader I value space in the poem, on the page. I personally need a break as I read from image to image.

  I also wanted to echo the ocean’s wave pattern so that visually the reader is on the boat and then in the water, finally coming back up for breath transformed.

  [A line break, then]

  Drama.

  What prompted the intermingling of both oceanic and musical images?

  Well, to be honest, this poem’s subject matter is the humpback song. Scientists don’t know whether the songs are ancestral but what is certain is that they change every year during migration. Only male humpbacks sing. You can hear them off of the North Shore of O‘ahu during the winter months when these whales come to these waters to give birth and breed.

  We, my family, has migrated so far already and keeps traveling. I am making a parallel between a “sohar” or a Caribbean Hindi/Bhojpuri birth song. These were brought by indentured laborers into the Caribbean from 1838-1917 during the period of Indian indenture. We are ushered into the world by breaking into sound. The first time I heard humpback song underwater without any technological aid was when I was with my mother. I imagined the songs my ancestors sang when they were crossing the kalapani.

  How did you choose which images to develop as concrete and which images to further abstractly, and what glues and balances the two types?

  I thought a body sense from the beginning to be the most important part. I wanted the reader to feel as though s/h/xe were on a boat and jumping into the sea. It’s not the mother and calf that are singing, but some other whales in the distance connected to these two “playing” at the surface. There’s a mysterious connection between song and body and songs that haunt the body.

  I wanted to tease out the connections that were a little more hidden: the sohar’s history just under my skin and its correlation with cetacean song. I thought by leading the reader through images that are juxtaposed some tension would arise: ghosts and sohars—both echo extinction and having been spouted as whale spume. These human songs are still inside of the speaker’s body.

  What are you currently reading?

  I am currently reading Yearling by Lo Kwa Mei-en, winner of the 2013 Kundiman Prize. I am also reading Weweni by Margaret Noodin, bilingual in Anishinaabemowin and English.

  What are you writing?

  Right now I am working on poems that examine the connections between the whale biology and ecology, queers caught up in the forced migrations during the period of Indian indenture, and ties between racism and homo- and transphobia.

  I also have some poem that I’m terming “anti-colonial magic spells.”

  And slightly less glamorous: term papers for my classes. One is called “Coolitude as an Arts Movement: Forging Legibility in North American Asian American Discourse” that examines Indo-Caribbean arts and history and the contemporary Asian American literary landscape.

• Repeating Islands - https://repeatingislands.com/2017/07/25/urvashi-bahuguna-interviews-guyanese-poet-rajiv-mohabir/

  July 25, 2017
  URVASHI BAHUGUNA INTERVIEWS GUYANESE POET RAJIV MOHABIR
  raj.png

  In “Meet Rajiv Mohabir, the Guyanese poet of Indian origin who writes to remind himself that he is alive,” Urvashi Bahuguna (Scroll.in) reviews Rajiv Mohabir, stating that “migration is his ‘dharma’, and his world in poetry stretches to colonialism, linguistic identity, religiosity, and his ancestors.” In his interview with Bahuguna, Mohabir affirms, “My writing has been transformed by connections I make between myself, American culture, India, and my Caribbean connections. I am not Indian, I am Guyanese. I do not see my work as an attempt at preservation but rather as cultural creation in the United States with an Indo-Guyanese accent, another point on the map to where I have migrated.” Here are other excerpts from the article and interview:

  Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir’s first book of poetry, The Taxidermist’s Cut, was chosen for the Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books. His second book, The Cowherd’s Son, won the Kundiman Prize and was published in May 2017 by Tupelo Press. In The Cowherd’s Son, Mohabir explores the roots and the trappings of migration. We are introduced to an India that has been transplanted to other countries. [. . .] Mohabir’s grandmother, referred to as Aji, is a woman with a story and a song for every facet of life. In a language that draws upon Bhojpuri and Hindi, Mohabir creates a world whose symbols are familiar to the Indian reader but whose interpretations will be a revelation to them. He spoke to Scroll.in about what poetry means to him, how it helps heal the scars of linguistic insecurity, and what he derives from a life lived in near-constant motion. [. . .]

  In an interview, you said about The Cowherd’s Son, “I was inspired by my Aji’s songs and stories. My poems are a kind of translation of her poetic.” Can you talk a little about what you call her “poetic”?
  I come from a very oral tradition: one of Calypso, Bhojpuri folk music, and storytelling and see this as my poetic inheritance.

  My Aji’s poetics and her life were very much informed by the Ramayana, but not the Ramayana of Valmiki or the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. She understood her world through the songs that she learned in diaspora with divergent story lines and caste reckonings – Bhojpuri folk songs that celebrate every aspect of life. There are songs for every geography of life: for the birth of children, grinding grains on a chakki, planting rice, every second of wedding rituals, death, cremation, and for all things spiritual. These songs stand in the place of Sanskrit mantras, replacing the Brahmanical with the vernacular. My Aji’s poetics, unlettered though they were, were anti-Brahmanical and invested in dissent – not very tuned to the tenets of the Ramayana.

  Her poetic also centred dis/relocations as she sang in New Amsterdam, Crabwood Creek, Toronto, and Orlando. I hope for my poems to echo my Aji’s trajectory, questioning who we are, having left India over 125 years ago, facing the future while recounting the past. I want them to question religiosity and fixity. [. . .]

  In the poem Gift from a Grandmother you write, “There is no shame/ in surviving anyhow you can…” What role has poetry played in your survival? As a queer immigrant in rural Central Florida, poetry was the vehicle of my survival. I am reminded of Audre Lorde. I am reminded of my Aji. Our songs and stories have survived and adapted to their new contexts and were not a luxury. In the cane field of Skeldon women sang sohars for the births of the children. In New York, I wrote a sohar poem for my niece who was born. I also write biraha against homophobic violence. I write to remind myself and my family that we are alive, that we have a deep history of oppression that we are even now working through. Poetry allows me to wade into treacherous waters and to bend driftwood and seaweeds into vessels to bear me to the far shore. [. . .]

  For full interview/article, see https://scroll.in/article/841876/meet-rajiv-mohabir-the-guyanese-poet-of-indian-origin-who-writes-to-remind-himself-that-he-is-alive

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/writers_recommend/rajiv_mohabir

  Rajiv Mohabir Recommends...
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  “When I feel extra invisible in the world of American poetry I feel the need to write more. I look for vehicles able to carry my syncretic history. I take a line from Agha Shahid Ali and Kimiko Hahn and looking across the sea. Ali’s ghazal and Hahn’s zuihitsu are perfect examples of migrating a form into English and making it one’s own, kin to the original form but changed through their mediation of it. Valuable poetry does not only exist in English in the United States. I’m an immigrant and my experience is valuable. An entire universe of poetry thrums outside of this myopic country. I migrate a form into the United States based on the multilingual chutney music from the Caribbean. This music came with me, packed in my luggage. The themes and images of my poems echo their influences and take shape through the alchemy of the line.

  Go ahead and try it. Make a form. Consider line length, rhythm, whether you’ll write in meter or use rhyme. How many lines will the poem have when it’s finished? Now for themes. Use what’s around you, what you have. Use the kitchen language that you’re told is not ‘proper.’ Write your broken tongue down on the page. You are not ‘broken.’ You are a wonder.”
  —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017)

• Kundiman - http://kundiman.org/announcements/2015/6/1/congratulations-to-the-winner-of-the-2015-kundiman-poetry-prize

  June 1, 2015
  Congratulations to the winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize!
  announcement
  Congratulations to Rajiv Mohabir, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

  Tupelo Press Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Levine and Associate Poetry Editor Cassandra Cleghorn have selected Rajiv Mohabir as winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize for his manuscript, The Cowherd's Son.

  The winner receives a $1,000 cash prize, publication by Tupelo Press, and national distribution.

  Winner of 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring 2016), and recipient of a PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant, Rajiv Mohabir received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, *and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the *Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i, where he teaches poetry and composition.

  The finalists were Radio Tower by Naoko Fujimoto, Cyclorama by Annie Kim, Child of Shame by EJ Koh, Goddess of Democracy by Henry Wei Leung, Autumn Troupe by Miho Nonaka, Tula by Chris Santiago, As Though We Are One by Alexandrine Vo, Republic of Mercy by Sharon Wang, and Overpour by Jane Wong.

  Congratulations to the winner and finalists!

  Now in its 6th year, the Kundiman Poetry Prize ensures the annual publication of a book by an Asian American poet. The award is open to self-identified Asian American poets at any stage in their careers. For more about the Kundiman Poetry Prize, please visit kundiman.org/prize.

  Tagged: Kundiman Poetry Prize, Rajiv Mohabir, The Cowherd's Son

• Queens College MFA Bulletin Blog - http://mfabulletinblog.qc.cuny.edu/2015/10/08/an-interview-with-rajiv-mohabir/

  ANNOUNCEMENTS, PUBLICATIONSOctober 8, 2015
  An Interview With Rajiv Mohabir
  O n the occasion of his receiving not one, but two major poetry book prizes, as well as a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, our winning alum, Rajiv Mohabir, was interviewed by our Program Assistant, John Rice. What follows is a conversation about perseverance, learning, and the craft of writing. (Also there are gifs.)

  DSC01287 - resized 75 p

  Note: Rather than repeating our names each and every time we speak, Rajiv’s voice will appear in regular font and John Rice will appear in bold. (You’ll totally get it.)

  —————————–

  How should we start our epic exchange?

  Why don’t we start off with something low stakes, to get us off the ground? I’ll send you a bunch of ‘this or that’ questions tomorrow. It’ll be like a lightning round before the big questions.

  Yes!!! I’m so excited!!

  Oh, yes, I’m so excited too!

  Here some questions that every human being living on the planet today may (or should) have to answer for themselves, at some point in their lives. (And look at you, getting them out of the way all at once!)

  Feel free to answer these however you like (yes/no/declaration of independence):

  Caramel or Peanut Butter?
  Peanut butter.

  Beatles or Radiohead?
  John Lennon and Thom York’s love child.

  Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing or Patrick Swayze in Road House?
  “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

  Dumplings or Samosas?
  Obvi.

  Dalai Lama or Yoda?
  The guru within.

  Bell bottoms or Peg Legs?
  Overalls without a shirt.

  Dancing or Talking?
  Poet-ing.

  Beach or Forrest?
  BEACH!

  Florida or Hawaii?
  The kingdom of Hawai’i.

  Brooklyn or Queens?
  Brook-who? Queens all the way!

  Ooooh, Swayze! Those are good answers.

  Let’s begin:

  Rajiv, the world is exploding for you. This past year, you’ve won the Four Way Books book prize (The Taxidermist’s Cut), the Kundiman book prize (The Cowherd’s Son), you’ve had another chapbook come out (Acoustic Trauma) with Ghostbird Press, you’ve won a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and you saved the Ewoks from imperialist forces, overthrowing The Empire and restoring balance to The Force. In fact, while we were finishing this interview, other great stuff happened too. How are you doing this? (Do you even sleep?) To what do you owe this success?

  My writing happens because I don’t have much of a social life! Well, actually, I spend a lot of time thinking of poems and metaphors that sometimes it’s the poetry that won’t let me rest. Isn’t that something from a Lifetime Original movie?

  I am so excited for The Taxidermist’s Cut to come out in March in time for AWP! You know, as far as the awards go, it’s exciting, and I never thought it would happen. I just submitted and submitted until the manuscripts started being semi-finalists and finalists. I have to thank my teachers and mentors along the way, as well as my mother who gave me money to keep submitting when I didn’t have enough to pay rent and submit to book contests.

  That and The Cowherd’s Son were both part of the same original manuscript–the poems that I didn’t use for my MFA thesis but I thought were cohesive. It was Oliver de la Paz who told me to pull apart these two thematic strains and to build them into fuller collections. I did and they both took flight.

  I sleep, and sometimes edits to books come to me. Sometimes I get messages from my subconscious mind through my dreams, sometimes it’s the ancestors in that other space that send me directions. So sleeping is actually part of my process, albeit less predictable.

  So I owe my success to my teachers, my mentors, my guides, my mother, my dreams, my publishers, and my ancestors.

  I read a story online about a Scottish author being rejected by the same book prize 44 times, before winning it on the 45th try.

  (Here’s the story, in case you want to read it for funzies:

  http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/author-whose-book-rejected-44-5878147)

  How did you keep yourself going? Writing, poetry especially, is such a solitary act. It makes it easy to give up, when it’s only you you’re disappointing. What motivates you, and what were some of the stumbling blocks in the path to getting your first full-length collections published?

  To keep myself writing, I let myself be haunted by lines and images and metaphors and found things like feathers, snake shins, egg shells, phrases in English, Hindi folk songs etc…

  I think the thing that has kept me submitting and writing is something I heard David Mura say once. He said that the successful artists/poets he knew were successful because they kept at writing. Publication is only one type of validation. I see what I do as continuing something that is at risk of disappearing–this is cultural, yes, but also something very globalized. It’s true that writing is lonely, but it also plugs me into something larger than myself–my sense of history, or the histories of colonization, homophobia, and racism that haunt me. It’s like writing to heal, writing to decolonize, writing to have a conversation with my ancestors. Giving up was not an option. I think the thing that I’ve considered giving up was the entire submitting process.

  I am crushed by each rejection, it’s true. They happen a lot. As a poet of color sometimes the whole process feels stacked against me: most journals publish mostly white poets, and I’ve not read many Indo-Caribbean poets in American journals at all. Sometimes the hardest part is feeling totally invisible. Who can or would want to relate to my obscure history or the three languages that I use?

  I remember once in a workshop, a fellow student told me to remove all of the “ethnic” sounding words, names, and places to make the piece more “palatable.” Thank goodness for Nicole Cooley who said that that was a bad bad idea to the entire class, and to Sunu Chandy who also reminded the class that I am writing from a place where these names and languages are actually spoken, and that removing them would be devastating. All this to say I think that I’ve been writing assuming that people wouldn’t find a queer Indo-Caribbean poet’s writings interesting or even legible.

  Craig Santos Perez, the creative writing director at the University of Hawai’i, once told me not to expect to be legible–to write how and what I want to and to make my own platform. All of this advice makes me feel free but also scared of not being successful immediately–but I feel like if I continue there is a possibility that a seed could root.

  With The Taxidermist’s Cut and The Cowherd’s Son, these two were once a part of the same manuscript–the same project that I separated from each other. I have submitted these two manuscripts in various forms more times than I want to count. I simply don’t want to think of all of the money I spent in submission fees–but I’ve been submitting these is some form for five to six years before they were taken. It was a stroke of luck. There are many fine poets who were finalists in both competitions.

  A QC student said that?! That’s a shame, and not just because Queens is the most diverse place in the world—more languages are spoken in this borough than any other place on the planet. That student doesn’t know what they’re missing; I’ve always found your work to be very “palatable.”

  I think something that people forget to mention when they talk about your success is that you’re now enrolled in a PhD program. Could you talk briefly about why that was a good fit for you, and how the course work that you’re doing there differs from the work you did here at QC?

  The idea of going on to do a PhD was motivated by the desire to teach creative writing and literature. I knew that I wanted to focus on Postcolonial theory and literature in a more concentrated way so I looked into this program. The University of Hawai‘i was my first choice and not for the reasons one would think. I vetted this program at least a year and a half before I applied. I wanted a PhD in English with a creative dissertation and UHM offered that.

  Since I am also a translator, I thought that a university that had a strong Hindi program would also be important. UHM has this as well with the added bonus of a strong connection between the English department and the Center for South Asian Studies. Being a Caribbean Indian or Indo-Caribbean, it seems funny to be so far away from the Antillean archipelago to learn about this stuff—but it works as there are so many similarities between these two differently colonized spaces. Being in Hawai‘i has been a political education on the run. I thought I knew what “diversity” meant living in Queens—but here it’s an entirely different thing.

  I have been able to work on understanding theories of colonization in Hawai‘i; they are omnipresent here. I have been able to make so many connections that have enriched my ways of understanding myself as well as my craft—I have charged my poems with this further migration.

  Let’s talk about work: people probably ask you “How do you do it?” but they, most likely, don’t mean it literally. Could you break down a typical day for us into a pie chart–how many hours do you spend generating new text, as opposed to editing? How much time do you spend sleeping, eating, going to classes, promoting yourself on social media, and goofing off?–(And what kind of pie would it be?)

  Ok here goes. Today is a typical day in the life of Rajiv:

  7:30: Wake up and get ready, Facebook/Twitter

  8:30-9:00: Gym

  9:30-11:30: Work in my office: annotate a reading poems/books/essays and make a couple pages of notes detailing its contributions to the area of focus (postcolonial theory, queer theory, or American poetry)

  12:15-1:15: Office hours where I meet with students and lend out my books of poetry that I rarely get back, talk about my poetic obsessions, and quote Kimiko Hahn and Nicole Cooley like hell, and write poems.

  1:30-2:45: Teach.

  3:00-4:00/5:00: Write. Edit. Write. Edit. Delete the whole mess. Write. Edit.

  6:00-8:00: Read for tomorrow’s annotations.

  8:30: Eat, Facebook/Twitter

  9:00: Have a beer and talk queer/postcolonial/poetry theory to my partner and/or friends.

  10:30: I’m usually out cold.

  You also held a full-time job, if I’m not mistaken, before you entered the MFA program. How did you writing habits differ then, when you worked a full-time job? (Was the pie a different filling?) Was it a struggle to fit writing into your day?

  When I was a teacher at the NYC Department of Education I found time to write after teaching. I never taught without taking classes—I was insanely busy then. Being a graduate student at UHM is a different kind of busy. I still have to juggle teaching, reading, exams, disserting, poeting, and personal living but most of these things are linked at least by place. I don’t have to travel from Bushwick to Flushing on a bus then a train then another bus.

  Fitting writing in during the day, though, was never a question. I would write when I got home. As I was eating. Before I slept. Sometimes I would wake up with words or lines in my head that I would write down or text to myself. I would grow these into poems at lunch, on my walk to work, on the train to class.

  Here I am able to read poems as soon as I wake up and write as long as I am not teaching. I like to use the mornings when I am getting ready to think of poems that I let brew as I work out and go to school. There is always so much to get done.

  I feel writers, like superheroes, need origin stories. We all start somewhere. Some of use were floated down the river in radioactive wicker baskets. Some of us were trapped in a cave-in in the library stacks until the words stuck to our skin. Could you write us a origin haiku? (You don’t have to think too hard about this, if you don’t want to–but have some fun, why don’cha?)

  Poem as Gestating Ascaris lumbricoides

  Morning hatches
  You

  wake & something

  unknown
  slithers out

  I think, in some way, we’re all the product of our influences; the things we read, hear, and see stick to us. Is there an anxiety to your influence (to make a Harold Bloom joke) or is there always room for more? How do you generate new texts when the past can be so present, at times?

  I do think that there is a wealth of people and places that can inspire and stimulate the imagination. There are so many different kinds of joy that we are capable of feeling as people. When I’m feeling like I hate something that I’ve written I seek out another idea of what joy can be. Sometimes joy is brought about by the unfamiliar. Sometimes from wonder. My friend Aiko Yamashiro once said, “Look at the mountain. You can’t help but feel gratitude. This is the best place you can be, emotionally.”

  As far as my old work—I keep reading things that I’ve written years ago and thinking about what a different place I am in right now. My previous obsessions are present but also so, so far from where I sit now. There is just so much that I will never know, and it excites me to think of how I can be changed.

  Did you have, or do you still have, a favorite professor from when you were here at QC? (Okay, you can start sweating.)

  Yes, the teachers at Queens College are people that I think of, quote, and speak of often. As for a favorite I’m not sure I can decide. Nicole Cooley, Kimiko Hahn, and Roger Sedarat have all been very supportive and encouraging of my work doing me one solid after another. Choosing one over another is to sever body and then to ask the ears which part was the most important.

  How has Queens College helped you to become the person you are today?

  Quite frankly, I would not be where I am without Queens College and the dedication of my teachers there. I would probably be more apprehensive about the world of poetry and wouldn’t have the solid grounding in writing as I do. I think the best decision—career wise, emotionally, spiritually—was to attend Queens College and to do an MFA in poetry. It has led me to unimaginable wonder.

  ——————————

  Rajiv Mohabir received the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring 2016), the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award, the 2015 Kundiman Prize for The Cowherd’s Son, and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His fellowships Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i, where he teaches poetry and composition.

  John Rice’s bio is a lot less impressive than Rajiv’s. John had a poem included in the Light on Sound sculpture installation, which can be heard at the historic Lewis Latimer House in Flushing, or by calling 646-604-4671 and pressing 20#. (Can sculptures answer telephones? This one can.) His work coordinating the Oh, Bernice! Reading series, along with his fellow Bernicians, has brought him to host a segment of the New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island, for the third straight year, and read his work in the inaugural Queens NYC Lit Fest. He continues to work for CUNY, both for the CUNY MFA Affiliation Group, where he, among other things, runs the Turnstyle Reading Series, and here at Queens College, where he assists the MFA Program by doing social media outreach, events planning, and many other things.

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  TAGS: acoustic trauma, ew

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Print Marked Items
Twelve new collections give fresh
perspectives on the human experience:
poetry beyond the basics
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal.
142.13 (Aug. 1, 2017): p96+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Calvocoressi, Gabrielle. Rocket Fantastic. Persea. Sept. 2017.96p. ISBN 9780892554850. $25.95. POETRY
In this follow-up to Apocalyptic Swing, a finalist for the Los Angeles Time Book Award, queer lesbian poet
Calvocoressi uses the Dal Segno, a musical symbol directing the player to return to an earlier spot in the
score, as a pronoun embodying "a confluence of genders" when referencing the Bandleader. There's a sense
that the speaker wants to return to an earlier time, too, a throwback feel to the pastoral scenes she sets and a
need to shuck convention. The speaker and the Bandleader meet in a series of poems strung throughout this
thought-provoking collection, and the use of the Dal Segno immediately strips away expectation, making
the focus on the acts of looking and touching rather than body parts interacting conventionally. The
resulting escalating eroticism and uneasy tension are something like the "tightness/in my back" that the
speaker allows to "open where my wings would/be" before turning from sun-slicked girls at a pool and
declaring memorably, "Somewhere my mother was dying/and someone was skinning a giraffe. /And I let it
go. I just let it go." VERDICT Occasionally meandering but capable of some real surprises: "You haven't
lived until a fox/has whispered something the ferns told him/in your one good ear."
Derr-Smith, Heather. Thrust. Persea. Oct. 2017. 72p. ISBN 9780892554867. pap. $15.95. POETRY
In her latest work, a Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award winner, Derr-Smith (Tongue Screw) uses an
intently packed, beautifully crafted pile-up of images to explore a rural Southern upbringing defined by the
ugliness of abuse ("So she's hit again. Hit once. Hit again when she ducks"). In a world shaped by violence,
by the casual male assumption of authority, and part of "a family of seekers, pick ax and lust," she's a girl
pursuing the intensity of experience on her own terms, "sneaking out the windows at seventeen and
throwing myself/ from airplanes over the devouring seas." Passion, in fact, thrums through these poems as
counterbalance and power, and there's uneasy satisfaction in watching the speaker turn her mean world
around to her advantage ("Make love out of the kick and the punch") so that finally "She outlasted them
all." Derr-Smith offers occasional glimpses of beauty ("rhododendrons, thrush in liturgy & lyric"), but this
is mostly the shabby-poor life of fistfights, hard sex, and vomiting all night in a bathroom "plastered with
pornography," the haunting instability emphasized by references to the durable Civil War dead. Still, she
returns "to dig up what was lost." VERDICT Highly recommended.
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Leung, Henry Wei. Goddess of Democracy: an Occupy lyric. Omnidawn. Oct. 2017.128p. ISBN
9781632430403. $17.95. POETRY
Addressed to the Goddess of Democracy, the huge papier-mache statue erected in Tiananmen Square during
the 1989 protests, and to replicas around the world, this Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize winner bears
witness to the ongoing struggle for human rights up to the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Leung
describes events through a spray of sharp images--"Late night diaspora sweats// Exile dread"--and though
headnotes to many poems helpfully give historical context, the writing never turns didactic. We experience
the protests at street level through a "torn off" I both inside and outside the movement: "I myself have been
here:/ been a hollowing throng of sweat/ ...I stood among and gave you/ neither stay nor shore nor help."
Though Leung points to Theseus as building democracy from "Aphrodite Pandemos, and Peitho:/ desire,
and persuasion," the poet seeks to define it in his own way: "But maybe love is best indifferent./
Democracy, too." And elsewhere, "Let me be your country. Let me be nothing for you,'' suggesting both
plan and possibility. Throughout, there's a grappling, an urgency, and a passion that makes the experience
very real. VERDICT Sometimes challenging, but a strong testimony in verse for those interested in both
poetry and politics.
Martin, Dawn Lundy. Good Stock Strange Blood. Coffee House. Aug. 2017.144p. ISBN 9781566894715.
pap. $16.95. POETRY
"Itch of layer, knot of/ hair--they call us Negro.ll To stand broad-footed in sensation of being lit up." Thus
opens this new collection from Martin, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda
Literary Award for her second collection, Discipline. Here, Martin uses a whiplash of short, punched-at-us
phrases that offer a powerful sense of African American history and the struggle to define oneself for
oneself, not as others would. History is a terrible burden ("What you drag:// your banjo, your braided/ necklace"),
and its depredations lead to a desire for deeper connection: "Wanted the swell of black earth, a
legacy, something larger than ourselves to hold us," says one poem. Another celebrates "my belly where
Mother// left her good stock,...her matter that matters." Elsewhere, Martin challenges the notion of being put
in boxes: "I am not a boy in anyone's body.// I am not a black in a black body./ I will not kowtow inside
your opposites." The results are visceral, though the fractured phrasing occasionally leaves one struggling
for sense. VERDICT An important work for sophisticated readers.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Mohabir, Rajiv. The Cowherd's Son. Tupelo. May 2017. 84p. ISBN 9781936797967. pap. $16.95. POETRY
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In The Taxidermist's Cut, winner of the AWP Intro Journal Award and the Four Way Books Intro Prize in
Poetry, Mohabir paralleled the hunted animal and the hunted human, whose love for his own gender makes
him an outsider within a community that itself has outsider status. In his Kundiman Prize-winning second
work, the rift with community remains ("Son, you are fit/ only for the greasy smoke/ of the body burning on
its pyre"), and the poet's anguish is expressed in an abundance of forceful images ("my palace will torment
you/ with rubies you bleed/ when thorns prick your quick"). Here, though, Mohabir expands his reach,
referencing Indian mythology ("the Cowlord rumbles, the sapphire /hurricane of Yaduvansh rumbles") as he
works his way through Indian communities from Guyana to Trinidad to New York. He scathingly surveys
the consequences of colonialism ("Brits distilled rum in coolie blood") while capturing the sorrow of those
far from home, often involuntarily ("Every night Sita dreamed an India that/ did not want her back." There
are moments, too, of superb tenderness ("I say your words at night to taste you"). VERDICT Gemlike
poems that will reward many readers and surprise not a few.
O'Rourke, Meghan. Sun in Days. Norton. Sept. 2017.96p. ISBN 9780393608755. $26.95; ebk. ISBN
9780393608762. POETRY
Along with the collections Halflife and Once, O'Rourke has authored the highly regarded memoir The Long
Goodbye, about coping with her mother's death, so it's hardly surprising that this new collection is delivered
in forthright confessional style. Interestingly, the opening poem, "Self-Portrait as Myself," mourns
something she never had--"the daughter I lost/ by not making her," which sets the tone for the poems of
bittersweet remembrance and reflection to come. The long title poem captures the sense of time passing as it
moves from a child's lazy days of summer to skaters on a Maine lake, with a mother in the background
advising, "Stop worrying/ about the future, it doesn't/ belong to us and we don't belong to it." Instead, we
get a sense of the steady drip-drip of events, of life "made of days and/ days, ordinary and subvocal."
Throughout, O'Rourke is excellent at limning the hazy sense of loss that inevitably defines our moving
forward and how we can therefore feel detached from ourselves, somehow fraudulent. "Used to know how
to live," says a plaintive but tough poem, and O'Rourke gives us some guidance as she acknowledges "soon
enough/ it'll be winter." VERDICT Popular poetry for all readers.
Phi, Bao. Thousand Star Hotel.
Coffee House. Jul. 2017.112p. ISBN 9781566894708. pap. $16.95; ebk. ISBN 9781566894708. POETRY
Phi (Song I Sing) is a multiple Minnesota Grand Slam poetry champion and National Poetry Slam finalist
seen on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and it shows in his forthright, declamatory style, as if
he were in direct conversation with his readers. It's a style that fits his heritage, for as the opening poem
says, "Vietnamese people have always been spoken word poets." Yet throughout he worries about his ability
to voice what really matters ("And I wonder/ if I ever will find a language/ to speak of the things/ that haunt
me the most?"). How will he tell his daughter about the war or challenge the racism he has encountered in
this country? Still, he does so, with simple eloquence: "How much blood and history can one last name
hold./ ...The opposite of history is erasure." Phi speaks broadly of social abuses while focusing on the Asian
and particularly the refugee experience in America, disclosing fraught, tender scenes of family life (as when
he regrets buying his daughter a Barbie Dreamhouse). And as the title poem shows, his fluid, open writing
is frequently shot through with moments of lyricism. VERDICT Accessible, accomplished, and troubling,
this should intrigue many readers.
Rafferty, Charles. The Smoke of Horses. BOA. (American Poets Continuum). Oct. 2017. 104p. ISBN
9781942683476. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781942683483. POETRY
Prose poems can seem opaque or even nonsensical, but multi-award-winning poet Rafferty (The
Unleashable Dog) delivers a fine collection that shows how the subgenre should work. Take "A
Demonstration of How One Thing Leads to Another," in which a man who misses his train stop finds
himself in a plane above the Andes, then in a Buenos Aires brothel, then back home in bed with his wife.
The poem obviously feels surreal, like a Magritte painting in prose, but it's contained by a beautiful and
satisfying logic. Rafferty can be meditative ("I have always believed that if I jumped out of a window I
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would turn into grackles before hitting the sidewalk"), philosophical ("The great minds come down through
the years like monkeys descending from high branches"), lyrical ("The moon has torn a hole in the weather
above my bedroom and is sweeping the dark from my pillow"), and disturbing ("The deer are browsing the
topiary as they try to decide which car should kill them"). But he always imagines interesting scenarios we
can read ourselves into, unself-indulgently saying something keen about our world in language "sharp as
broken vodka bottles." VERDICT A solid addition to most collections.
Sealey, Nicole. Ordinary Beast. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2017.80p. ISBN 9780062688804. $24.99; ebk.
ISBN 9780062688828. POETRY
In poems whose fluid, wide-open style belies their grit, Sealey explores issues of race, gender, and sexuality
within the context of cultural expectation. For instance, "candelabra with heads," shows how African
Americans approach every moment weighed with history: "Had I not brought with me my mind/ as it has
been made, this thing,/ this brood of mannequins, cocooned and mounted on a wooden scaffold, might be
eight infants swaddled and sleeping." Instead, she concludes, "Who can see this and not see lynchings?"
(Shouldn't we all?) Elsewhere, she observes, "The West in me wants the mansion /to last. The African
knows it cannot." Sealey is sharp-tongued and refreshing as she steers through human relationships, happy
for a friend whose bad love life ended well and painting indelible portraits of a drag queen, a true believer,
and the diva dreaming of being a spoiled white girl. She can wax existential ("We are dying quickly/ but
behave as good guests should") while also turning in a darkly hilarious reenvisioning of the game Clue.
VERDICT Surprisingly, given her numerous honors and the assuredness of her writing, this is a debut
collection, but Sealey's stature as Cave Canem's executive director has rightly created anticipation.
* Smith, Danez. Don't Call Us Dead. Graywolf. Sept. 2017.104p. ISBN 9781555979775. $16; ebk. ISBN
9781555979775. POETRY
In this remarkable second collection from Kate Tufts/Lambda Award winner Smith, the content as well as
the writing is transcendent. A core poem, "dear white america," already viewed in a YouTube reading by
over 300,000 people, opens with the observation, "i've left Earth in search of darker planets," and every line
that follows is a stab-in-the-heart summation of the consequences of racism, delivered in taut, pearlescent
prose. Claiming that "my grandmother's hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the
blood-fat summer swallows another child," Smith demands, "take your God back," adding "I am equal parts
sick of your go back to Africa & I just don't see race." In the end, the poet looks for a place where there's a
"history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard...or redline or shackle or silence." That longing also
surfaces in the opening poem, which evokes a sort of sunlit afterlife where black males killed violently
gather freely and "jump// in the air and hang there," unburdened by fear. These two poems alone are worth
the price of admission, but the whole collection measures up. VERDICT Highly recommended.
Vertiz, Vickie. Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut Univ. of Arizona. Sept. 2017.72p. ISBN 9780816535118.
pap. $16.95. POETRY
"Come closer, chula// There's something I've been meaning to tell you." These beckoning lines, ending a
poem set on a city bus, capture the intimacy and disturbing undercurrent that typify Vertiz's fine second
collection (after Swallows). Vertiz portrays her Los Angeles neighborhood with verve and what might be
described as fond anger. We see poverty ("the death stench in our water in our jobs") and fractured families.
In one poem, "Dad's paychecks couldn't feed two houses," which explains why the pet rabbits end up as
soup, and elsewhere a postcard from pops says, "I wish you were here, mija/ Come on, don't get all feelings
on me/ I may be drunk/ But at least I'm home." The uncle delivering an unexpected kiss, teenagers in tight
black jeans, the "pleyboy" boyfriend who proved "a hard climb/ A home to mispronounce" ("Fuck that, said
my brother. There's other fools to love"), a mother and brother signifying "ten thousand truck miles ("Why
won't/ their coughs go away?")--these make up a chamber opera that Vertiz vivifies with jangle and sparkle.
VERDICT Fervent reading about the urban Hispanic experience; for all readers.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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Wicker, Marcus. Silencer. Houghton Harcourt. Sept. 2017. 96p. ISBN 9781328715548. pap. $15.99; ebk.
ISBN 9781328715586. POETRY
In bold, brash, open-hearted poems delivered with satisfying sass, Wicker, author of the National Poetry
Series-winning Maybe the Saddest Thing, reflects on simply being while black. A news story about a tiedup
dog resonates painfully ("You see human/ interest piece, ...I see eclipsed casket"), jogging in the park
inspires anxiety ("Sometimes, I can barely walk out/into daylight wearing a cotton sweatshirt//without
trembling"), and second guessing your every move becomes second nature ("Because my flat-billed, fitted
cap/ cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree. See, I practice self target
practice"). "Watch Us Elocute," a poem that exemplifies Wicker's way with titles, opens with a posh woman
gushing over the poet's eloquence and leads to the massacre at the AME church in Charleston by a
"throwback// supremacist Straight Outta Birmingham, 1963," concluding "None of us is safe." Wicker gets
personal, too, ("think/ you're the first fool with a laptop/ to ever arrive at a blank screen/ & ask, is this
enough?"), and one poem ends "O Lord, make me me," which is both caustically funny and emblematic of
someone wanting to be himself in a society that makes it so very hard. VERDICT Highly recommended.
Barbara Hoffert is Editor, Prepub Alert, LJ
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "Twelve new collections give fresh perspectives on the human experience: poetry beyond
the basics." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 96+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500009445/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=40aacce3.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500009445
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The Cowherd's Son
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Cowherd's Son
Rajiv Mohabir.Tupelo, $16.96 trade paper (14p) ISBN 978-1-936797-96-7
In this Kundiman Prize-winning follow-up to 2016's The Taxidermist's Cut, Mohabir continues to
demonstrate an uncanny ability to compose exacting, tactile poems that musically leap off the page. These
poems modulate between tales of Hindu deities, recollections of history and folklore: these are complicated
family dynamics, queer intimacy ("My love tasted of sea/ and relics"), acts of resistance, and accounts of
shifting geographies and displacement. Mohabir's candid work is steeped in the realities of being a
mixedcaste, queer IndianAmerican; his speaker sings these lived experiences into verse--moving between
pleasure, sensuality, hunger, alienation, and injury: "It shocks me to dream my body/ as a cut pomegranate."
Mohabir even uses the quarter rest symbol from sheet music in the breaks between sections to make explicit
the collection's musical nature and the poetic silences the work necessitates. Each of the book's seven
sections approaches identity from a different angle, including that of the ancestral grief passed down
through the Indian indenture system and chronicles of conquest and empire channeled through the mythical
El Dorado. Mohabir offers much to appreciate, and even among the strife he records, there is a yearning for
and pursuit of joy: "In this building of shattered whispers// I say your words at night to taste you." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Cowherd's Son." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 41. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03a3b3c3.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820759

Hoffert, Barbara. "Twelve new collections give fresh perspectives on the human experience: poetry beyond the basics." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 96+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500009445/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017. "The Cowherd's Son." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.

• The Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-cowherds-son/
  Word count: 1055

  BOOK REVIEW: THE COWHERD’S SON
  Reviewed by Tom Griffen

  The Cowherd’s Son
  Poems by Rajiv Mohabir
  Tupelo Press, May 2017
  $16.95; 99 pp.
  ISBN: 978-1-936797-96-7

  Rajiv Mohabir’s second full-length collection, The Cowherd’s Son, depicts the narrator’s journey as a queer, Indo-Caribbean man chronicling an oppressive ancestral past. The speaker bravely unravels a lineage wrought with material loss and compromised traditions. Poems incorporate the derided languages of forbearers: Creole and Guyanese Hindi. Though Mohabir often places English translations nearby, this helpful gesture suggests he is fulfilling an assumed role as the go-between, someone who can bridge the gap between multiple worlds of understanding.

  The book’s intention is marked in “My Name is a Map” (part III):

  How is Ganga-jal pure when its human filth blinds
  every creature that moves beneath its silt?

  From the murky slime at the bottom of the lake
  the lotus grows, petals unstained by dirt.

  Mohabir’s poems are complex, but his use of the page delivers an aesthetically-pleasing geometry. Gentle and consistent patterning creates a familiar tempo even when, as in “Chaar,” lines are laden with less-familiar vernacular or imagery:

  Maha rajah jai ho! Cow Minah tek out a-bone wha de inside ‘e
  pagri and put ‘em in ‘e had an rub ‘em an a-bone stat fa sing.

  Papa, o papa na mash me bone!
  Bahadur hamke mareke phulwa luta hai.

  Papa, o papa na mash me bone!
  Bahadur kill me yondah side an teef me flowah
  rose.

  The final lines of the title poem offer witness into a queer, mythological, and mixed-caste identification:

  Oh Kanhaiya, O Madhav,
  My father Ahiri, my mother Brahmin
  Now Christian carnivores.

  Mixed-caste and queer-countried,
  I’m untouchable, the only Mohabir left
  who still scores your shloklas.

  Content ranges from nineteenth-century indentured servitude where, as in “Blind Man’s Whist,” “Any cutlass deal / will cost an eye,” to “Mysterious Alembics” where the narrator calls his grandmother to “record her voice telling me how to make daal.” The globe-spanning geographic landscape, from Varanasi to London to Niagara Falls, physically represents the challenge of change resulting from transition.

  “Touch Me Not” introduces the father. A voice bellows, “Son, you are fit / only for the greasy smoke / of the body burning on its pyre.” This voice continues, “But you are an imposter, suckled / at a dead heifer’s teat, a Hepatitis crow.” The father believes he has been slighted by having a queer son. Feeling refused of the child’s youth, he sends him off with a curse:

  When men ask

  to which mount you belong,
  you will look at their palms,
  your own hands stiff
  with cow shit stoking a pyre flame.

  “The River Son’s Betrayal” is the aftermath wherein the speaker lives a camouflaged life:

  I too pretended
  much for my mother’s sake,

  buried secrets in silt;
  swallowed tumult of the adolescent
  thrill of wrestling other boys

  The speaker’s masquerade is no antidote even if “queerness // was a tool for survival” (“Bound Coolie”). “Gift From Grandmother” marks the falling from familial ranks.

  though your five sons
  clutch their father’s dhoti.
  I’ve always wished

  for a crossroads, an option
  to buy my freedom,
  to save my own hide

  In the same poem, the narrator proclaims, “There is no shame / in surviving anyhow you can.” He has inherited such strength from his progenitors.

  Mohabir unifies the tumult of migratory life into one place: the human body. The body is exploited, wounded, diseased, and set aflame. Its charred ashes are doused and reabsorbed by the earth. In “Chamber Music,” violent images are softened with bursts of short, rhythmic lines: “Press me. Strings cut / your index, middle, ring.” “Hold me. Smash the gourd.” “Watch me stoke a concerto in your bones.” “Diabetes Prayer” pays homage to ancestral laborers of sugar plantations—their weathered bodies proof of corporeal colonization.

  Gods of cane, I too am bent before the grinder,
  My tongue swollen and pasty.

  Gods of cutlass and gashes unhealed,
  a hymn exhales rest in the air; my stitches rip with each inhale.

  I drape myself in a shroud,
  my ox ribs riddled with fructose scars.

  The work of sixteenth-century musician, Tansen, taps into ancient mythology. “Deepak Raga” is based on a Tansen melody believed to spontaneously create fire. Another, “Malhar Raga,” conjures rain. In namesake poems, Mohabir engages this fire and water metaphor to highlight a conflicted identify. In “Deepak Raga” he writes, “Look at the darkness in your temple. / What words will spark your fuse.” The poem continues, “Sienna finches flit from lips to wick. / I catch one glowing ember and / swallow it whole.” A forced ingestion burns the body from the inside out.

  The Cowherd’s Son is an impressive collection marked by honest vulnerability. It humbly displays a harrowed family history and the ensuing feeling of being an outlier. Struggles with homophobia, racism, violence, and xenophobia all serve to help the speaker achieve a deeper sense of self-acceptance. Ultimately, The Cowherd’s Son enlists darkness to empower the potential for goodness.

  In the conclusion of the final poem, “Unwitting Pilgrim,” the speaker advises against identity categorization: “In fact, stop racing toward / contained closure in this open space.” Repetition in the next line is like a mantra. A prayer. It continues, “In fact, stop reading; stop— // close your book right now.” As if to say, start living now.

  Tom Griffen is a North Carolina writer with California roots. In 2015 he received his MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. His work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, O-Dark-Thirty, and others. Tom is also an endurance athlete, spoon-carver, and professional speaker in the world of specialty retail. In January 2018 he is beginning a walk across America. See more at www.mywalkinglife.com.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/04/the-taxidermists-cut-by-rajiv-mohabir/
  Word count: 728

  THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT BY RAJIV MOHABIR
  REVIEWED BY KENJI LIU

  April 29th, 2016

  To begin, consider the title. Consider the origins of taxidermy, a colonial pseudo-science. A modern inheritance from the Victorians, who returned from missions and conquests with exotic fauna, flushed with the impulse to survey, sketch, display curiosities, and publish authoritative studies. The imperial impulse to categorize and appear to have mastered, through simulacrum, frozen, known—determined.

  To begin the taxidermy with incisions, multiple but educated, precise and efficient. To fill the body with wire, stuffing, wool, plaster, plastic, glass, clay. Then to sew, glue, pose, mount for display. To call upon to preserve.

  But what if the line between taxidermist and the taxidermied is not very distinct? In Mohabir’s collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut, questions emerge: Which body is appropriate, necessary, of utility, or even possible? Which body tells the required story to family, church, community, nation? Which body gets to be human? Where can one display the not enough, the excessive? The internalized taxidermist, bringing with him a considerable amount of Victorian colonial history, is a set of forces against which queering then erupts. The sexualized, racialized body erupts in the parlor, the study, the suburb, simply by existing, feral.

  Taste the burst
  of liqueur-flowers from the lungs

  on your tongue. Taste the entire life
  in the dark. Taste every man

  who has ever put me in his mouth.
  (from “Ortolan”)

  Even within the boundaried field of a pseudo-science, there is still room for a measure of self-definition, to choose aspects of being to perform. In Mohabir’s collection this seems to be a spiraling movement, returning to itself and back out, a ritualistic posture of skin and fur that sabotages any attempt at true mimicry. This introduces difference, a cultivation that cannot be tamed.

  Mohabir‘s collection stalks itself, assembling and reassembling bodies, tracking their installation, sometimes as-is, sometimes wished against or for, never static. The body/animal/being slips from its own skin, modifies it, wears it. It is a rogue taxidermy, a multimedia modification of parts, cross-referential, cross-fertilizing. It nests in, rubs up against the dominant narrative of its genus, and also makes its own history, lineage, and taxonomy—choosing, selecting.

  Cover your own skin with the hide that does not hide. Place your arms and legs in the empty pelt and sow yourself up.
  (from “The Taxidermist’s Cut”)

  Rajiv MohabirCutting and modification is also erasure, of what exists, what precedes. Life, death, life. And so The Taxidermist’s Cut is full of erasures, of taxidermy guides, field guides, books of knowledge that exist to outline the boundaries of its own area of knowledge. Cutting and erasure digs into the viscera of a text, snipping, transplanting, grafting, sewing.

  I am not inside that skin you fix.
  (from “Field Care”)

  Within the collection’s pages, we find tracking, stalking, sewing, zipping, tearing, ripping, pelt, skin, fur, mouth, surgery, incision, pinning, welts, thorn, feather, burn, wing, light, moth, phantasm, hymn, throat.

  When you cut mouths along your forearm
  your whole body gasps.
  (from “Cutter”)

  Throughout it all, the collection travels along the edge of life and death, since taxidermy is a negotiation of both. Still, ultimately taxidermy as such is a failed mimicry of life, but in that space of failure there germinates a kind of alternate life, untamed, erotic, a raw energy. Unsublimated, but ready to be directed, shaped, embodied.

  What darkness endures
  if this body is a lantern?
  (from “Rhincodon typus“)

  Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection of destruction and reconstruction, and we the readers are left among the moonlit ruins, with a strange ache of recognition.

  Kenji C. Liu is author of Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. His poetry is in American Poetry Review, Action Yes!, Split This Rock’s poem of the week series, several anthologies, and a chapbook, You Left Without Your Shoes. He is a Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers. More from this author →

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-935536-72-7
  Word count: 239

  The Taxidermist's Cut
  Rajiv Mohabir. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (98p) ISBN 978-1-935536-72-7

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  In his excellent debut, Mohabir exposes desire and inner turmoil through the measured incantations of a queer, Indian-American voice that refuses the burdens of a homophobic and racist world. He eloquently describes how the brown body survives, clinging vigilantly to longing, lust, and love: "I mean to say/ I am still—this trembling breath of a comma, this coincidental object of your want." This finely detailed and chiseled work recalls the precision hinted at in the book's title: "Pick up the razor./ It sounds like erasure." In many ways these poems evoke a queer Larry Levis; narrative poems take strange and unexpected turns: "the man opposite you will blaze/ in your throat when his denim// and leather are a nest/ calling birds to their weaving." Sensual and rhythmic, Mohabir's observational gifts evoke the strange and intimate: "your nail beds are filled with fresh soil, hair ripped/ out by the roots, and semen." In between these twists and turns are masterful strokes of what W.E.B. DuBois would have described as the double consciousness of the minoritarian subject. Mohabir illuminates his own wounds, and as the reader watches him dresses and stitches those wounds, "A queer flutter knocks about your ribs." (Mar.)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 04/04/2016
  Release date: 03/01/2016

• Poetry Witch
  http://www.magazine.poetrywitch.com/review-the-taxidermists-cut-by-rajiv-mohabir/
  Word count: 712

  Review: The Taxidermist’s Cut by Rajiv Mohabir
  Amanda Johnston / July 24, 2016
  Four Way Books, 2016 ISBN-13 978-1-935536-72-7 Paperback: 98pp; $15.95
  Four Way Books, 2016
  ISBN-13 978-1-935536-72-7
  Paperback: 98pp; $15.95

  The Taxidermist’s Cut mines its title for everything it’s worth, but the arresting poems found in the first full-length collection from Rajiv Mohabir show no signs of the strain of over-extended metaphor, nor do they suffer under the awkward weight of an over-determined symbol. Rather, these poems expose their literal and figurative layers slowly, anatomizing the starling who “beats his beak / against the skylight glass” alongside the “bone close to the body” and “the echo of a nightstalker, streaked / brown on white” with the same tenderness as lovers’ fingertips or the telling scars on the falconer’s wrist, each one “a lifeline lifting to flight.” Precise, incisive, and utterly convincing, phrases like these play on the book’s central subject without ever taking on too much grandiosity or devolving into bad puns.

  Although many of the poems grow out of clearly personal material, Mohabir avoids the “I”-driven syndrome so common in American poetry by taking full advantage of shifts in point of view. In procedural poems like “Ortolan,” a submerged “you” becomes the addressee of a series of merciless commands: “Take the bird alive and blind it.” When the master taxidermist instructs the apprentice, it’s tempting to read the poem as a conceit in which the poet offers advice to a former self as that self encounters the unfolding cruelties of desire. The speaker goes on:

  …When you

  put this songbird between your lips

  and bite down, veil your face

  with my mother’s silk sari.

  Contemporary poetry so often errs on the side of the self-aware and snide that few indeed are the poets who would risk the word “songbird,” which carries remnants of an effete and genteel poetic tradition; but in its threatening context—and in the larger oh-so-queer context of the collection—the word glimmers, accentuating the vulnerability of beautiful things. More devastating, the sharp shift to the first person implicit in the phrase “my mother’s silk sari” rips away the distance maintained speaker and listener in preparation for poem’s the memorable ending: “Taste every man // who has ever put me in his mouth.” In this way, virtually every poem slices down to the root.

  Mohabir’s speakers give voice to tremendous brutality, all of it earned by an America sick with irony, a country lost in the contradictions between what it promises and what it delivers. And in poems like “[Last night],” Mohabir delivers easy-to-botch commentary with economy and grace. Composed of only ten lines and choreographed in couplets and two single-line stanzas, the poem begins with a seemingly innocuous conversation about film history that broadens into an accomplished critique on race and on queer identity:

  you ask me if I consider myself white.

  I imagine dipping a brush into the fallen

  stars in my own hands to paint you Technicolor.

  The deadpan delivery of “you ask me if I consider myself white” intensifies the relief this reader experiences when the poem glides toward wonder in the lines that follow. The almost magical realism inherent in the image of the star-dipped brush exemplifies Mohabir’s ability to balance depictions of wounds, wounding, and the wounded against the compensatory power of poetry—the ability of a poem to provide poet, speaker, and reader with access to worlds of greater possibility.

  The poems in The Taxidermist’s Cut shimmer and shudder, and they deserve to be celebrated. Rajiv Mohabir is a brave poet. He’s armed with a razor and a map of the heart.

  – Josh Davis, PWM Associate Editor

  Poetry Witch editor Josh Davis earned an MA in English from Pittsburgh State University, an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Stonecoast MFA Program, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi. He is a PhD student at Ohio University. His poems have been published widely.

  July 24, 2016 in Reviews. Tags: book review, poetry

• Lantern Review Blog
  http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/tag/the-taxidermists-cut/
  Word count: 691

  Tag: The Taxidermist’s Cut
  July 14, 2016
  Editor’s Corner: July Summer Reads and the Poetics of Reckoning
  Mohabir_Liu_July2016Feature
  Debut collections from two LR contributors: Rajiv Mohabir’s THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT and Kenji C. Liu’s MAP OF AN ONION.
  This month, our Summer Reads include Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016) and Kenji C. Liu’s Map of an Onion (Inlandia Books, 2016), two remarkable debut collections that feel so fully conceived, so urgently and articulately expressed, that one hesitates to call them “debuts,” as these are clearly two poets who have been at this for longer than the term “first book” implies. Deeply theorized, expertly crafted, and placed squarely in conversation with the poets’ respective family histories, cultures, and discourses of science and post-colonialism, these works draw the reader into a thoroughgoing investigation of what it means to be human, delivered into a specific time, body, and cultural milieu. These poems are the maps they have fashioned for themselves, forging a poetics of reckoning in pursuit of generational and lived truth.

  In The Taxidermist’s Cut, Rajiv Mohabir’s lines, both sinister and lovely, function as cuts that reveal and divide, shimmering with the erotics of violence. Transfixed, one finds oneself unable to look away, arrested by the elegance of the language and the way, when held to the skin, it causes the body to shiver with pleasure. The line, the body, the text, the means by which bodies make and destroy themselves; “Pick up the razor. // It sounds like erasure.” Formally, the couplet features prominently throughout, raising the question of what’s joined, what’s split, what adheres together and what pulls apart. Stitched through with found text from Practical Taxidermy, The Complete Tracker, and other taxidermy-related manuals, the poems confront the body with a mixture of scientific detachment and intimacy, as the life of the body—its homoerotic desire, its violation—is rendered in acute detail. Members of Mohabir’s family, past and present, drift in and out of The Taxidermist’s Cut, as, marked by a pilgrim poetics of wandering, the book moves through the West Indies, the South, boroughs of New York City, reckoning with memory, desire, and histories of conquest and slavery. These poems are breath caught from the throat, blood cut from a wound—the cry that follows, in pleasure, in pain, indistinguishable from song.

  Kenji C. Liu’s Map of an Onion, a work deeply textured by memory and place, maps its own set of explorations beyond and within cartographies of language, national borders, and the body. Like Mohabir’s, Liu’s subjectivity is shaped by multiple histories and homelands, all impressed upon a poet who writes with deep sensitivity to the pre-colonial realities of place, drawing us into greater awareness of what it means to be American, immigrants, humans. “Ghost maps are hungry maps,” he writes, tracing lineages and interlocking histories through time. It’s a mapmaking of the self, a “search translated between my family’s four languages.” Marked in places by profound longing (“Home is on no map, and explorers / will never find it. That time has passed”) the poems, in their searching, take us from Mars to Moscow, suburban New Jersey to the World War II Philippine jungle. The book itself, neatly sized and beautifully produced, fits compactly in the reader’s hand and brings to the body an awareness of itself as a artifact translated across cultures, yet possessing a language all its own. Map of an Onion, too, concerns itself with the act of incision, especially of paper, “the surgery of documents” cutting ruthlessly across land, sea, and families. What binds and what breaks—folded, torn. “Taste your own / luscious // fissures,” the poet says, the places where selves meet; the sinew, cartilage, and tendon of bodies that are bound and, simultaneously, transcendent.

  * * *

  What books are on your summer reading list? We’d love to hear about them! Leave us a comment below or share your best recommendations with us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (@LanternReview).

• Gravel
  https://www.gravelmag.com/amie-whittemore.html
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  Singing Towards Wholeness, a Review of Rajiv Mohabir's The Taxidermist’s Cut
  Amie Whittemore

  Wonder and sorrow cohabitate while reading Rajiv Mohabir’s
  The Taxidermist’s Cut, as they might while observing taxidermy.
  Preservation and desecration stitch the same seams. Art
  suggests life, makes a sculpture of death. These dualities are all at play, at odds, and
  occasionally in apprehensive balance in Mohabir’s stunning debut collection.

  As Mohabir explains in an interview with Queens College, his alma mater, The Taxidermist’s
  Cut is itself a work of taxidermy: [The Taxidermist’s Cut] and The Cowherd’s Son
  (winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) were both part of the same original manuscript–the poems that I didn’t use for my MFA thesis but I thought were cohesive. It was Oliver de la Paz who told
  me to pull apart these two thematic strains and to build them into fuller collections. I did and
  they both took flight. The Taxidermist’s Cut certainly flies. It is also populated by wildlife--
  birds, particularly, but also coyotes, wolves, bears, and deer—all familiars of the rural South
  where the poems’ speaker grew up.

  The book is organized in seven sections that are in recursive, revelatory conversation with
  each other. The majority of the book coalesces around the speaker’s experiences as an Indo-
  Caribbean homosexual man, growing up in the southern United States and learning to accept
  himself despite the hegemonic and heteronormative forces of mainstream American culture,
  which threaten to erase him and his experience. The threat of invisibility is developed in
  both content and form: many of the poems are Erasure” poems, featuring language from
  outside media. Take for instance, “Preservation (erasure poem),” which borrows its language
  from the YouTube video, “Life Size Mounting”: “The bone close to the body shines /
  whitely in front of you, though / insects may devour this casing.” Through lineation and
  subtraction, Mohabir not only makes poetry of instruction, but also subverts the text’s
  original aims, calling into question taxidermy’s ability to fully reassemble a body.

  Isolation, shame, and despair often fester unseen in the human heart; Mohabir renders these
  experiences visible through metaphoric use of animals and landscape. Yet his poems don’t
  make the false step of romanticizing nature—threat is ever present, for animal and human,
  the texture of experience enhanced rather than flattened. In the opening poem, “Preface,”

  whether you catch me or not is not the point.
  You look first at wandering deer, the bigger prize,
  full of meat, with hide to cure, but keep an eye
  peeled for upland birds, too, smaller,
  easier to mount once ensnared.

  Mohabir’s selection of the word “mount” points to the layered experiences the book seeks
  to uncover. Already, he forces us to think of sex and capture simultaneously, as no
  experience is isolated in Mohabir’s universe.

  The first section examines the many prongs of invisibility: as prey, being invisible is essential
  to survival; as a creature desiring love and witness, invisibility starves the soul. Mohabir’s
  poems invite us into both spaces through the hunt. His poems are rife with hunters and
  hunted, pursuit and capture. Sometimes the speaker is the object of the hunt, and
  sometimes, as in “The Complete Tracker,” he is the subject:

  I trek the wreckage of myths:
  toadstools on a felled tree, or
  the crescent-shaped impression
  from a hart’s escape to his denning
  ground. His hoof print a split heart.

  Again, Mohabir uses language to evoke the complexity of desire and desiring: while one
  heart might escape, another splits. The speaker’s heart cracks again and again in this
  collection: over his desire for other men and that desire’s dismissal by dominant culture, in
  overcoming self-loathing, and after every encounter with racism and homophobia. How could his heart not split?

  The hunted heart and its fragility are beautifully drawn in the second section, which includes the long title poem, and borrows language from taxidermy instruction manuals to articulate the speaker’s suicide attempt. The word “dress” surfaces as another container for layered experiences, indicating both putting on clothes and gutting a kill in the field. Mohabir writes, “Take off your skin right here. Dress yourself for the field. Pull out your / entrails and stuff your yellow belly with coals.” This dismantling and reassembling of the self comes from a
  place of internalized shame and despair: “Inside you rain. You are a forgery. Not a wolf. Not
  an Indian. Not a son.” By performing taxidermy on himself, the speaker tries to heal his wounds: “cover your own skin with the hide that does not hide. Place your arms / and legs in the empty pelt and sew yourself up.” In the speaker’s attempts to reclaim his body, to fully inhabit himself, his identity, and his desires, the book takes a turn toward an uneasy truce:
  race and desire can neither go unnoticed nor fully witnessed by others. The speaker must
  learn to live with these tensions as informing identity rather than obscuring it.

  Particularly in the latter half of the book, animals become vessels for exploring these
  tensions. In “ Rhincodon typus” (scientific name for the whale shark), the shark becomes a chord of hope: “There is joy in night. It summons you / between continents to whisper /
  prayers into its ink,” ending with the question, “What darkness endures / if this body is a lantern?”

  This joy in darkness, in a body filled with light, indicates an ornery hope that persists despite challenges that refuse reconciliation. The book’s final turn focuses on the speaker’s relationship to his lover(s) and father, the betrayal and adoration inherent to both types of relationships. However, unlike in the first few sections of the book, where despair seems the dominant emotion, the speaker gains confidence as he faces the father’s homophobia more directly. The speaker embraces his own “song,” his own story. In “ Tibicen auletes ” (cicada), Mohabir writes:

  There are so many reasons
  to burrow into earth's dark.

  Do not fear desire's nightly resurrection.
  There are so many more reasons

  to break this shell and call dusk
  with your open throat.

  Mohabir’s debut is a wonder and a sorrow. He matches lyricism with deft narration, interweaving other texts with his own work exquisitely and harrowingly. A haunting collage, The Taxidermist’s Cut feels at once timely in its honest, vulnerable exposition of race and sexuality, and ancient, in its foundation in myth and the natural world. Mohabir is a deft taxidermist, selecting what to preserve and what to revise, thus limning the anxiety these seemingly contrary impulses create. He shows us how we are each cobbled together from borrowed and original parts, internal and external forces. From these motley notes, we each must fashion our own songs and “sing a human hymn / of imperfection,” and, hopefully, in the singing be made whole.

  The Taxidermist's Cut is available from Four Way Books (publication date: March 1, 2016)

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  About the Author: Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and co-founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series in Virginia. Her poems have won numerous awards, including the Betty Gabehart Prize and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
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