We investigate the properties of mesons with the exotic J^PC = 1^-+ quantum numbers. Starting out from the light-quark domain, where the pi_1 states are used as references, we predict the masses of analogous quarkonia for cbar{c} and bbar{b} configurations. We employ a covariant Dyson-Schwinger-Bethe-Salpeter-equation approach with a rainbow-ladder truncated model of quantum chromodynamics.