"Mohabir's poems plumb and reimagine the history of human interaction with these aquatic mammals, classified by science as cetaceans. Mohabir's poetry is as existential as it is timely, political, and emotional. Each poem invites readers to contemplate the wondrous-what it's like to be alive, for cetaceans and for Homo sapiens. Within the space of a stanza, he roves through questions about scientific classification, immigrant identity, carnal desire, and climate change."
"It was when I was about to go to Hawai'i for the first time. When I arrived there, I was shaken by just how thrilling it was to be in the water with such large, lumbering, graceful animals. Intriguing to me still are the ways of sea mammal phenomenology; their relationship to gravity, and their communications are so mysterious, so different from human understandings of relationality to space and our compact with heaviness."
Imagined lives of whales, dolphins, and porpoises examine the history of human interaction with cetaceans through existential, political, and emotional lenses. The work juxtaposes scientific classification with lived relationality, probing immigrant identity, carnal desire, and climate change within compact, vivid stanzas. Close encounters with coastal environments and observations of sea mammal behavior highlight differences in gravity, communication, and spatial relationality. Humor and tragedy combine to create moments of wonder and urgent ethical questioning. The interplay of taxonomy, phenomenology, and personal experience foregrounds empathy for nonhuman life while interrogating human categories and environmental responsibility.
Read at Psychology Today
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