Rajiv Mohabir

Seabeast

Poetry, 2025

Description forthcoming…

Whale Aria

Poetry, 2023

“For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,” recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.” As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; “the echo is amniotic.” “Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you’ve called / since childhood.” Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In “Why Whales Are Back in New York City,” Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. “Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms,” Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. “Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you.”

Cutlish

Poetry, 2021

Antiman

Hybrid Memoir, 2021

Born in London to Guyanese Indian parents and immigrating to the United States when he was a toddler, Rajiv Mohabir’s familial history is one of displacement and constant migration. His great grandparents were indentured laborers who worked on British sugar plantations after the (official) abolition of the slave trade in 1834. In South America, his parents were forced into Christianity and colonial education before moving to England. After growing up in Indian immigrant communities in the US, Mohabir is inspired by his own blended identity to approach his experiences in multiple genres. Full of poetry, prose in distinctive dialects, myth, and family lore, Antiman is a song cycle in which Mohabir wanders the intersections of his stifled history. He returns to Varanasi, India a century after his ancestors left to work the sugar cane fields of the British colony and then to Orlando, Florida where he studies at the feet of his unlettered Aji. When he goes to New York City his cousin labels him “antiman,” a Caribbean slur for queers. His kin show him the fraught side of consanguinity as he is outed to his extended, conservative Guyanese American family. His life changes forever. Dawning the slur as a cloak, Mohabir moves to New York City to work as an ESL teacher and struggles, without family, to love his brownness in the city known as the second diaspora for Indians from the Caribbean: Queens. He discovers that the word means just that: anti-man, the man who beds men, a word that Mohabir moves into and upsets through his travails with fraught relationships. Throughout the journey, his family’s ancient lore and epics haunt him at every crossroad, lead him into poetry, and ultimately reveal his own story woven into the legacies of myths and legends, the singing of epics, of exile, outings, connections, and desire.

The Cowherd's Son

2017

Mohabir continues to demonstrate an uncanny ability to compose exacting, tactile poems that musically leap off the page. Mohabir offers much to appreciate, and even among the strife he records, there is a yearning for and pursuit of joy. —Publishers Weekly

Broadening the scope of his award-winning debut to consider the wider Indo-Caribbean community in migration across the Americas and Europe, Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir’s inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet-narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.

I Even Regret Night

Translation, 2019

Award-winning Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) brings his own poetic swagger and family history to a groundbreaking translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara, originally published in India in 1916—the only known literary work written by an indentured servant in the Anglophone Caribbean. Sharma, originally from Chapra in the current Indian state of Bihar, was bound to the Golden Fleece Plantation in British Guyana. His poems about the hardships of “coolie” life on the island were originally published in the Bhojpuri dialect as a pamphlet of spiritual songs in the style of 16th-century devotional poetry. I Even Regret Night brings Mohabir’s new translation of Sharma’s text together with a contextualizing introduction by Gaitra Bahadur, who found the manuscript in the British Library, and an afterward by Mohabir exploring the role of poetry in resisting the erasure of this often-overlooked community.

The Taxidermist's Cut

2016

“This is the sort of turn that speaks to how deft a poet Mohabir is, how skillfully he works the taut space between figure and figured, between tenor and vehicle. He is a technician of elaborate metaphor but deployed here not to mask or soften the complexities of power between lovers, between dominant and subaltern bodies and cultures.” —Kenyon Review

The Taxidermist’s Cut inhabits the experience of a queer brown youth awakening sexually in a racist, anti-immigrant matrix. As an Indo-Caribbean, the queer-countried speaker is illegible as an “Indian” as well as an “American.” Haunted by his migration narrative, the speaker must survive a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon him both by himself and others. This is a collection of twisted love stories-as-slits that exposes the meat and bone of trauma and relief. Mohabir draws from source texts such as animal tracking guides and taxidermy manuals to highlight themes of discovery, preservation, and survival on all fronts.