“Seabeast, Rajiv Mohabir’s remarkable fifth collection, is a marvel of synthesis: a study in cetacean evolution becomes–through astonishing and unforgettable turns toward the human–a deeply intimate personal portrait. These nimble, strangely affecting poems weave together, seamlessly, extinct, mythological, and living sea creatures, cruising in public restrooms, an estranged brother, and a dissolved marriage, as if to remind us that everything is inside everything, everyone a part of everyone, especially when, in bigotry, rage, or shame, we presume or desire otherwise. Seabeast is a profound, healing, and deeply humane book to read and read again.” –Charif Shanahan

Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, Seabeast lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things.