“The Taxidermist’s Cut”

Rajiv Mohabir

Four Way Books, $15.95

“Orphan”

Joseph Han

Tinfish Press, $12

Anatomical drawings in the 16th century often featured bodies taking part in their own flaying, wielding knives in postures of liberation as they exposed their complicated insides. I couldn’t help but imagine these sinewy figures looking over my shoulder as I read two new poetry books by Ph.D. students in English at the University of Hawaii: “The Taxidermist’s Cut,” Rajiv Mohabir’s first full-length collection; and “Orphan,” Joseph Han’s debut chapbook.

“The Taxidermist’s Cut” is capacious enough to encompass sexual and spiritual awakening, Indo-Caribbean identity, cutting and the animal kingdom. In Mohabir’s poem “Ortolan,” the French tradition of eating endangered songbirds acts as a metaphor for sexual desire. In “Canis Lupus Lupus,” the speaker blurs the distinction between human and animal, and connects the difficulty many people have distinguishing wolves from coyotes with the difficulty of distinguishing between ethnic groups: “Do you expect others to see / nuance speckling your pelt when / your coolie mother can’t tell / Gujarati from Punjabi?”

In the title poem, the speaker, who feels his body is inscribed by his family’s history, struggles to make himself legible: “Your great grandparents traveled kalapani from India to South America. It tries to erase you still.” He laments, “Inside you rain. You are a forgery. Not a wolf. Not an Indian. Not a son.” The speaker must find a way to survive colonial dislocation, racism, homophobia, and the violence enacted upon him by others and by his own hand: “Pick up the razor. / It sounds like erasure.” These poems offer no easy answers; they are painful, unsettling and dazzling.

While the speaker in Mohabir’s poems takes hold of the blade himself — saying, “You always want to refashion yourself into some other self” — in Han’s “Orphan,” the speaker’s relatives in South Korea submit to the plastic surgeon’s blade.

“Orphan” is an astute and fascinating exploration of physical, familial, cultural and linguistic alienation. As family members change their faces, the book’s title takes on a heightened significance. How can the speaker recognize himself in them? At the end of the poem “Plastic Bridge,” in which he is urged by his father to get a nose job, the speaker concludes, “This bridge / on my face / that I had to connect / us would not / be enough.”

Language, too, is not enough. In “Words,” the speaker toils and fails to master Korean: “a frustrated father asked of me, are you silence? / I let my stare speak, let the space / between us carry my shame.” In “The Korean Syllable,” speaking is a violent penetration and purging: “I force fingers into my throat like accusations, / engrave shapes in the passage to remembering.” In the final poem, the speaker’s mouth has been wrapped in bandages for years, “regenerating into skin keeping your lips still.” Yet he must find a way to speak.

Mohabir and Han find their way through employing techniques of erasure as well as repurposing other texts. Mohabir employs taxidermy, hunting, tracking and animal texts, and Han includes texts on plastic surgery. Both poets recharge informational and instructional language to create startling juxtapositions and rich metaphors to reckon with fundamental questions of being and belonging. The result is brutal and radiant poetry that complicates life, both inside and out.