Rajiv Mohabir

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman is a stunning hybrid memoir that blends literary genres to tackle questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to explore the author's experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States. 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.

Antiman

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. 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. "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...Mohabir's candid work is steeped in the realities of being a mixed-caste, queer Indian- American; 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.'"--Publishers Weekly starred review Praise for Rajiv Mohabir's previous book: "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... Mohabir illuminates his own wounds, and as the reader watches him dresses and stitches those wounds, 'A queer flutter knocks about your ribs.'"--Publishers Weekly

The Cowherd's Son

A survival guide that shows how bigotry and redemption are mapped on the psyche and on the body

The Taxidermist's Cut

"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today. --Nicole Cooley"--

Cutlish

Dunya Mikhail

Danez Smith

Jericho Brown

Ilya Kaminsky

Tiffany Midge

Tanaya Winder

Lawrence Matsuda

Gary Copeland Lilley

Anna Balint

Thomas Hubbard

Shankar Narayan

Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, edited by Seattle-based writers Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard, contains poems, stories and images from 117 writers and 53 artists, divided into five fluid and intersecting sections: Legacies, We Are Here, Why?, Evidence, and Resistance. We begin with Legacies because the current increased climate of hate in this country didn't begin with the 2016 election, and to find its roots we must look to U.S. history. Take a Stand, Art Against Hate Anthology comes at a critical time in our nation's cultural discourse surrounding intersections of identity, resistance, and looking at the past to forge a path forward. This collection spans form, tone, and theme without feeling cluttered; you find yourself reading something new while experiencing the same emotions many of us have come to find all too familiar. Thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, this collection flows seamlessly from poetry to visual art, creating an anthology that is not only a commanding and introspective read, but a necessary one. We can regard Take a Stand: Art Against Hate as a print-form peace march, an ongoing campaign for justice for all of the struggles embodied in these writings and depicted in the photos and artwork included here. This is a deeply democratic anthology-standing alongside nationally prominent voices such as Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Tess Gallagher, Ilya Kaminsky, Dunya Mikhail, Marge Piercy and Danez Smith, are luminaries renowned in this region and beyond, such as Kathleen Alcalá, Gary Copeland Lilley, Claudia Castro Luna, Melissa Kwasny, Priscilla Long, Tiffany Midge, and Gail Tremblay.

Rajiv Mohabir

Books

Your next favorite book is out there