Rajiv Mohabir : part one

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three poetry collections, the latest of which is Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021, Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir), received the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

What are you working on?

Currently I am working on editing my book tentatively titled Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) that will be out in almost a year and a half. This looks at the bioacoustics of humpback whale song to use what humans understand as its aesthetics to make a form (or constraints). The themes that I have held loosely in my mind while putting this collection together was the world of 1838-1917: the height of the whaling industry as well as the exact period of South Asian Indenture. Happening during this time also is the active colonization of the Pacific, of the Philippines, and of Puerto Rico by the United States. 

As in all of my obsessions queerness, Brownness, and a postcolonial critique take on ecocritical dimensions and frameworks for understanding the sangam, the intersectionality, of these issues.  

I am also at work on a collection of poems that I am calling “deviant translations” for their multiple crossings in and out of Guyanese Bhojpuri, Creole, English, and Hindi. I have taken five chutney songs and performed at least twenty translations in and out of these various languages looking to extend my (very elastic, deviant) interpretations as broadly as possible that they are no longer translations.