From the Publisher
“Rajiv Mohabir achieves a gorgeous, passionately lyrical ‘hybrid’ of a memoir-mosaic, sojourning through straightforward narrative, multifold geographies and legacies, and evocative (and provocative) vulnerable reflections, all infused with a deeply yearning poetical heartbeat. Antiman lives, breathes, and dances in unbridled joy.”
—Thomas Glave, author of Among the Bloodpeople
“In this highly-saturated and multi-textured memoir, Rajiv Mohabir invents a mode to encompass the complexities of his existence as an Indo-Guyanese poet who is ‘queer sexually, queer religiously, queer by caste, and queer countried.’ With an intergenerational life story marked by various migrations—and some may say, transgressions—Mohabir, here, carves a vessel to contain his multitudes using the instruments of prose, song, poetry, and prayer. Authentic and defiant, this memoir responds to erasure with assertion, to derogation with reclamation, and to fragmentation with relation. Fans of Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, and Saeed Jones will adore this book!"
—Serena Morales, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)
“Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is a powerful portrait of the artist as a young, brown, immigrant, queer man and is my favorite kind of book, prose written by a poet. Mohabir’s writing is stunningly beautiful and profoundly moving. Aware that his grandmother’s voice and the ‘broken’ languages she speaks will soon disappear forever, he records her songs and dedicates himself to transcribing and translating his grandmother’s words, this careful attention and pleasure in language birthing his life as a poet…. This book stops time to celebrate voices worth remembering.”
—Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers
“With highly engaging prose poetry, Mohabir’s hybrid memoir is a rhythmic and tantalizing beat of exploration, longing, and yearning. Having grown up under the mystical beauty of his grandmother’s Bhojpuri as well as her Guyanese Creole, he sets off on a journey that will change his life forever. Told in sentences charged with beauty and rage, we get an unapologetic account of a life that thrums in our veins, building to a drumbeat that starts in the Caribbean and explodes into the world.”
—Krystal A. Sital, PEN award finalist author of Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad
“In this searing, unflinching investigation of diaspora, heritage, and personal evolution, Rajiv Mohabir has fashioned a blues that blurs the boundaries of genre, a book-song that haunts and resonates. Antiman is a potent, lyrical fusion of harmony, dissonance, and recognizance. Music lives on every page.”
—Jabari Asim, author of We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival
“A confluence of poetry, narrative, song, and history, Antiman is a dazzling show of literary prowess. Through the memoir, Mohabir not only strives to reclaim his intersecting identities in the face of erasure and violence—he seeks to reunite with his grandmother and extended community across time and space. In doing so, he breaks and reinvents the mold of memoir. A compelling and moving masterpiece.”
—Anna, White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)
