Arctic Play

Describing visual poetry feels like playing a game of telephone with the strange and wondrous figures that reside in Mita Mahato’s brilliant poetry comix collection, Arctic Play: rocks that are cuts of meat, 12-14 gold-whiskered walruses, the many individual colors existing within a single sea. What follows is meant as a kind of postcard sent from deep inside the world she brings into being, an invitation inside a missive: Dear— In this far-away space and time, thinking of you. 

Play here functions both a genre, a noun, and verb, a description of the ways Mahato explores language and text in constellation with the visual media and materials by salvaging, splicing, fragmenting, weaving, layering, shaping, tincturing, erasing, obliterating, and spacing. 

The discarded materials appear as physically tactile, fragile, and ephemeral as the beings encountered here, their individual and communal life spans clipped short, fragmented, by the climate catastrophes that are no longer approaching but arrived. With the dedication and care of an archivist, Mahato gathers, arranges, creates and recreates, composes and decomposes. Her practice is preservation and devotion, and offers an elegy that is always, at its marrow, an ode, a love poem. 

Arctic Play is a landscape that asks us to experience and navigate the place in the poem and the poem as a place. From the bounds of the comix panel, the dimensions of a poem, a page, a book, the bent edges of a postcard, a beloved writes Wish you were here.