Four Way Books, 2016 Paper: 978-1-935536-72-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3613.O376A6 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection that centers the pressures of being 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 tries to make himself fit into his environment by sloughing off his skin and stretching new ones over his body. At stake here is surviving a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon the speaker and violences the speaker enacts upon himself through cutting. Mohabir engages with the body and the land as a series of incisions and overlays to cover the damage of memory of a South Asian brown body dealing with aggressions and joys. This is a collection of twisted love stories-as-slits that exposes the meat and bone of trauma and relief. Drawing from outside source texts such as animal tracking guides and taxidermy manuals, these poems attempt to show the process of how to survive being erased on all fronts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
RAJIV MOHABIR is the winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, and has received multiple fellowships. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawaii.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface • Rural Sports (erasure poem) • Ortolan • Cover Scent • The Complete Tracker • Canis latrans • Trip Line • Ritual • The Taxidermist's Cut • Tear • Bondo • At the Window • Oracle • Field Care • Preservation • Ganga • Corentyne • Thames • Econlockhatchee • Hudson • Rhincodon typus • West Indian Manatee • Mallotus villosus • [Last Night] in Jackson Heights [This Morning] with Him, Not You • Caroline Wren • Passerina ciris • Cutter • Raised by Crows • Canis lupus lupus • To a Father Who Can't Accept His Son • Ursus thibetanus • The Right Tool for the Job • /ren/? • Paynes Prairie, Gainseville • Reference and Anatomy • Taxidermy for Pleasure • Homosexual Interracial Dating in the South in Two Voices (erasure poem) • Anolis carolinensis • Tibicen auletes • Myotis lucifugus • Cicada to Eunomos • Play-bird (erasure poem) • Catching Lepidoptera at Night
The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection that centers the pressures of being 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 tries to make himself fit into his environment by sloughing off his skin and stretching new ones over his body. At stake here is surviving a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon the speaker and violences the speaker enacts upon himself through cutting. Mohabir engages with the body and the land as a series of incisions and overlays to cover the damage of memory of a South Asian brown body dealing with aggressions and joys. This is a collection of twisted love stories-as-slits that exposes the meat and bone of trauma and relief. Drawing from outside source texts such as animal tracking guides and taxidermy manuals, these poems attempt to show the process of how to survive being erased on all fronts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
RAJIV MOHABIR is the winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, and has received multiple fellowships. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Hawaii.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface • Rural Sports (erasure poem) • Ortolan • Cover Scent • The Complete Tracker • Canis latrans • Trip Line • Ritual • The Taxidermist's Cut • Tear • Bondo • At the Window • Oracle • Field Care • Preservation • Ganga • Corentyne • Thames • Econlockhatchee • Hudson • Rhincodon typus • West Indian Manatee • Mallotus villosus • [Last Night] in Jackson Heights [This Morning] with Him, Not You • Caroline Wren • Passerina ciris • Cutter • Raised by Crows • Canis lupus lupus • To a Father Who Can't Accept His Son • Ursus thibetanus • The Right Tool for the Job • /ren/? • Paynes Prairie, Gainseville • Reference and Anatomy • Taxidermy for Pleasure • Homosexual Interracial Dating in the South in Two Voices (erasure poem) • Anolis carolinensis • Tibicen auletes • Myotis lucifugus • Cicada to Eunomos • Play-bird (erasure poem) • Catching Lepidoptera at Night