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Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir

Whale Aria

"'For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,' recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.â€‌ As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters."