Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Whale Aria

Whale Aria

Mohabir, Rajiv

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1954245688
ISBN13: 9781954245686
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: Sep 15 2023
Pages: 116
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.32 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Awards: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue, recounts Rajiv Mohabir's speaker in Boy with Baleen for Teeth. As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; the echo is amniotic. Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you've called / since childhood. Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In Why Whales Are Back in New York City, Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms, Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you.

Also from

Mohabir, Rajiv

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All