Description
About the Book
Arctic Play is a drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows.
Reviews & Interviews
“Arctic Play: A Conversation with Mita Mahato and Michelle Peñaloza,” The Bellingham Review, Issue 88
Praise for Arctic Play
“Mita Mahato’s Arctic Play is a trembling climate change chronicle that transports its reader to a place, a time, and a feeling.” ~ Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
“Elegant, whimsical, and thought-provoking, Arctic Play offers us encounters with glaciers, fossils, polar bear sightings, and with the imagination each incites through the play of paper and ink.” ~ Anna L. Tsing, co-author of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
“Arctic Play is a truly astounding work on which the topography of language itself is mapped, contained, ordered, assembled—just as it simultaneously is fragmented, enjambed, disjointed, and undone. This is the wild genre of poetry comix at its absolute best.” ~ Bianca Stone, What is Otherwise Infinite
“With a caring awareness, Mahato hints at the expansive possibilities of the comix medium—and the human experience.” ~ Lale Westvind, Grip
“Arctic Play is both wildly experimental and completely confident in how it inhabits poetry, comics, collage, weaving, and playwriting.” ~ Aidan Koch, Spiral and Other Stories
“Mahato brilliantly lurches her readers between the sublime and the unsightly, longing and loss, activism and complicity, privilege and marginalization. Arctic Play shipwrecks and moors us at the intersection of the human and more-than-human where we collectively weather the climate crisis.” ~ Jasmine Elizabeth Smith, South Flight
“A tour de force from one of our most exciting book artists.” ~ Johnny Damm, Failure Biographies
About the Author
Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Building on the long tradition of cartoonists who direct the medium’s unique juxtaposition of word and image toward political and social reform, her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism. Her poetry comix have appeared in places including Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades and listed in The Best American Comics of 2019. Her work has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. Her mother was Prem, born in Bihar. Her father was Basanta, born in Bengal. She currently lives in Seattle.
Request a Review Copy
If you are interested in writing a review of Arctic Play, conducting an interview with Mita Mahato, hosting an event, or supporting the project in some other way, or if you know someone whose advance reading of this book would benefit it, fill out the form below. Please be detailed about the nature of your interest. We are pleased to consider and respond to serious inquiries.
