Cutlish

By Rajiv Mohabir

In Cutlish, a title referencing the rural recasting of the cutlass or machete, Rajiv Mohabir creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker in the newest context of the United States. By joining the disparate threads of his fading, often derided, multilingual Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri linguistic inheritances, Mohabir mingles the ghosts that haunt from the cane fields his ancestors worked with the canonical colonial education of his elders, creating a new syncretic American poetry — pushing through the “post” of postcolonial, the “poet” in the poetic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781945588983

Rajiv Mohabir

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

Book preview

Bhagwati, my Aji, opens a cream soda bottle top with her teeth. She pours it into a glass and mixes it with tinned milk. Langtime, dis whole place been bush, all about. Abi tek a-cutlish an clean ’am. Her ordhni slips from her head.

The Po-Co Kid

maatahet logan bol na sake hai

darsana nahin maral, murjhaake

Let’s get one thing queer—I’m no Sabu-like sidekick,

I’m the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam

on the street. I don’t speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,

can’t control minds, have no psychic powers.

I clip my yellow nails at dusk; on Saturday nights

I shave my head. Forgive me Shiva,

forgive me Saturn. I’m Coolie on Liberty Ave, desi

in Jackson Heights—where lights spell Seasons