The Taxidermist's Cut (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781935536727)

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: Rajiv Mohabir
ISBN-10: 1935536729
ISBN-13: 9781935536727
Publisher: Four Way Books
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2016
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.80w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/04/2016
Library Journal 04/01/2016 pg. 99