In Celebration of Seabeast

Join AAWW for a celebration of Seabeast by Rajiv Mohabir, featuring Megan Pinto, Ashna Ali, and Rosamond King!

Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, Seabeast lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things.

Mohabir’s language ingeniously plumbs the depths, illustrating how the objectification fundamental to the construction and preservation of animal taxonomy mirrors the internecine violence of humankind on both a broad and intimate scale. “We were misnamed / again and again: first Hindu, / then Hindoo, then Indian, then / Coolie, all subhuman / much like this precursory cetacean / of the Eocene, named / in Latin great lizard— / anguilliform, what to make / of twist and tear, teeth / gnashing sharks and durodons / into pulp, judged by fossilized / gouges in enamel and finger / holes on skulls?”

Through the invention of race, the conquest and consumption of land, and the cultural amnesia enforced on the subaltern, imperialism threatens human survival on this planet just as we have misunderstood, taken captive, and hunted whales nearly to extinction. Meditating on the results of genetic testing, Mohabir details how, like his white ex-spouse’s “ancestors / from northern Germany / played bone flutes / for their dead at gravesites,” a lab “one day exhumed” them all “in perfect pentatonic scales.” Meanwhile, he wonders what of his Indo-Caribbean heritage, complicated by the obfuscating forces of indenture, ethnic oppression, and frequent relocation, “can be revived” from this “wastebasket taxon, / us unnamed hoard of no future?” Of the Irrawaddy Dolphin once “known for / herding shoals of fish / for fisherfolk / in whose nets / they now drown,” Mohabir observes that “learning human / language opens you // to betrayal.” “Trust me,” he urges, “though I am no // hairless dolphin— / I once had a husband.” Standing at the confluence of these prehistoric, mythological, and contemporary tributaries feeding our attitude toward whales, Mohabir asks, who is the seabeast, really? The namer or the named? The answer prompts us to see that, if we recognize the legacy of human barbarism in the whale’s long history with us, we can also locate a new reserve of resilience and survival. It is their example Mohabir uses, not the “bright honey” of their blubber that once would “fuel lanterns,” to power his own spiritual refortification. “Maybe I will, from filling my lungs, blood / rushing to my core, / into a finned thing, / transform.”

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Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry and has been awarded two gold medals from the Foreword INDIES and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

Raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn, Ashna Ali is a queer and disabled child of the Bangladeshi diaspora, and the author of The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) and the Substack, PAIN BABY. Their work is featured or forthcoming from The Margins, Indiana Review, Sun Dog Lit, and beyond. A Best-of-the-Net nominated poet, they are the poetry editor for Epiphany Magazine and co-editor of Dead End Zine with Hunter Hodkinson. With Divya Victor, they are the co-host of the poetry podcast The Source, produced by Asian American Writers Workshop. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and are earning their MFA in the low-residency Creative Writing program at Randolph College.

Rosamond S. King is the author of poetry collections All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone, as well as Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. She performs around the world and teaches at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. The goal of all of her work is to make people feel, wonder, and think.

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The event will be live streamed on Zoom with auto captioning for those who cannot join us in person. For those joining us in person, we are located on the 18 West 21st Street, Suite 900, there is an elevator that will take you directly to our office. Masks are strongly encouraged for audience members for all AAWW events; if you forget yours, one will be provided for you. We have two commercial grade air purifiers. We highly encourage all in person guests to take a COVID test at home prior to the event. If you have had COVID or have had known contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID in the 10 days prior, we ask you tune in for the live stream instead.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

18 W 21st St suite 900, 18 West 21st Street, New York, United States