The Taxidermist’s Cut

by Rajiv Mohabir 

The Taxidermist’s Cut inhabits the experience of 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 must survive a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon him both by himself and others. This is a collection of twisted love stories-as-slits that exposes the meat and bone of trauma and relief. Mohabir draws from source texts such as animal tracking guides and taxidermy manuals to highlight themes of discovery, preservation, and survival on all fronts.

Paperback | 98 pages | Four Way Books | 2016

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Taxidermist’s Cut, The Cowherd’s Son, and Cutlish, which was awarded the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, placed second in the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature, was longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Prize, and was a finalist for both the New England Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His memoir, Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir won the Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography. As a translator, his version of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2020. In 2022, he was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder.