In his new book of poems, Seabeast, Rajiv Mohabir, imagines the lives of whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Mohabir’s poems plumb and reimagine the history of human interaction with these aquatic mammals, classified by science as cetaceans. Mohabir’s poetry is as existential as it is timely, political, and emotional. Each poem invites readers to contemplate the wondrous–what it’s like to be alive, for cetaceans and for Homo sapiens. Within the space of a stanza, he roves through questions about scientific classification, immigrant identity, carnal desire, and climate change. Mohabir combines humor and tragedy, affording his human audience the opportunity to feel eternal philosophical questions and urgent political ones. In this interview, he reflects on the mysterious lives of aquatic mammals—and what we humans might learn from them.

Jason Tougaw: What motivated you to devote yourself to writing poems about sea mammals?

Rajiv Mohabir: My family moved to Florida in 1987, where I learned to love the natural world. We spent a lot of time at the beach and I learned the names of the animal species around me.

I first started dreaming about whales before I first saw humpbacks in real life. It was when I was about to go to Hawai‘i for the first time. When I arrived there, I was shaken by just how thrilling it was to be in the water with such large, lumbering, graceful animals.

Intriguing to me still are the ways of sea mammal phenomenology; their relationship to gravity, and their communications are so mysterious, so different from human understandings of........

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