Rajiv Mohabir

About his bevy of learned disciplines, Mohabir said in an interview with Kundiman,"I have never thought of these things as disconnected—in fact the music I came to poetry from was religious/cultural.

[11] The Rumpus said: "Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection of destruction and reconstruction, and we the readers are left among the moonlit ruins, with a strange ache of recognition.

"[12] Publishers Weekly said: "In his excellent debut, Mohabir exposes desire and inner turmoil through the measured incantations of a queer, Indian-American voice that refuses the burdens of a homophobic and racist world.

"[14] The Los Angeles Review of Books said, "The Cowherd’s Son is an impressive collection marked by honest vulnerability.

Struggles with homophobia, racism, violence, and xenophobia all serve to help the speaker achieve a deeper sense of self-acceptance.

This tension between epic gesture and private stillness pushes the collection forward and transcends setting, making The Cowherd’s Son an incredible symphony of movement and place, where identity is constantly redefined and reimagined in the context of historical memory.

In an interview with The Rumpus, he said:"When I was an MFA student, a classmate suggested I remove all Hindi words, place names, and familial relationships because he (a cis white man) could not understand the poem.

"He was the translator of the only firsthand account of the mass displacement of people from the Anglophone Caribbean: I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, which was released from Kaya Press.

[18] Her afterword to I Even Regret Night provides a picture of the author of the songbook, Lal Bihari Sharma, and insight into the process of recovering a rare and lost document of a marginalized history.

Gaiutra Bahadur writes about this text in her book Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, When she asked if I would like to translate the full document, I very enthusiastically agreed.

Since Hawai‘i is an illegally occupied nation that has a history of plantation exploitation and settler colonialism, translating this text in particular showed me how my own experiences of colonization resonate with this archipelago in the Pacific.