Arctic Play by Mita Mahato

About the 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.

Praise:

“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

“This is the wild genre of poetry comix at its absolute best.” ~ Bianca Stone, What is Otherwise Infinite

“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

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.

Read an interview with Mita Mahato

Mita Mahato will be joined in conversation by Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir.

Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator.

Host or Publisher Lost City Books