✨ Featured Offer
Brand New
$17.83
List Price: $17.95
🚚
See all 5 offers from $17.83 FREE standard delivery by: 01 Apr 2026
Overview
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."
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."
| ISBN-13 | 9781961897489 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1961897482 |
| Weight | 0.38 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 6.00 x 0.30 x 9.00 In |
| List Price | $17.95 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Pages | 120 pages |
| Publisher | Four Way Books |
| Published On | 2025-09-15 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
✨ Brand New
Seller details
Alibris
Sparks, NV, USA
Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 120 p.
Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026
Brand New
Seller details
GreatBookPrices-
Columbia, MD, USA
100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition. We offer expedited shipping to all US locat...
Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026
Brand New
Seller details
indoo.com
Avenel, NJ, USA
9781961897489.
Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026
Brand New
Seller details
Book Culture Inc.
New York, NY, USA
Brand New. Ships from an indie bookstore in NYC. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 120 p.
Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Bonita
Santa Clarita, CA, USA
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
Free delivery by: 01 Apr 2026