Rajiv Mohabir is the Winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books, and recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Rajiv Mohabir received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. A PhD candidate at the University of Hawai’i, he currently lives and teaches poetry and composition in Honolulu.

Books by Rajiv Mohabir:

Other poems on the web by Rajiv Mohabir:
Five poems
Two poems
"Dominion"
Four poems
Five poems
Five poems
Two poems
"Ancestor"
"Hiranyagarbha"
"The Po-Co Kid"

Rajiv Mohabir on Twitter.

About The Taxidermist's Cut:

"Rajiv Mohabir's debut collection is electric with fierce love--animal, erotic, obliterating--the hard and soft always bruising and buffing each other. The ways we hurt each other are similar to the ways we hurt ourselves: precisely, with a steadiness learned in the murk and danger of childhood. The cornfields of adolescence and the observation of animals teach us how to not only love each other and tear each other apart but also how to meticulously put what we love, what we destroy, back together again. Those actions may be metaphoric ('Wrens nest in any convenient home') or seem hauntingly lived (as in the poem 'Cutter') but in the brilliant title poem the work of 'the taxidermist' grips the reader's imagination as a consummate symbol of the flawed human enterprise of connection. Here, the strangeness of anatomy reveals the twinning of our opposites within: the logic of fact is beautiful; plain facts belie endless enigma; scientific procedures cannot render irrelevant the matchless singularity of a body (particularly a loved or lived one.) Mohabir's taxidermist takes on the great questions of what it is to be human: how is being human different than being animal, body, drive, psyche, the past, doomed, unique, and alone? With razor (what else?) precision, this poet lays bare not only the heart in its love, loss and world of care, but in its utility, its chambers and the question of what blood is, contains, and cannot ever be. The poet is no taxidermist, as his subjects are live and are survivors. They live to love, to find each other, to look right back at us as we look at them, letting us know that we are not separate. We're not separate from these cutters and the cut, the medicine or the wound, the metaphor or the memory. This new voice is primal, essential. It sings (as if it's merely breathing) the song of how we came to be sitting here in ourselves, in our bodies as they are, among the ruins inside and out."
—Brenda Shaughnessy