Maggie Queeney for Poetry Foundation Library book pick
"... 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."
Charles Hatfield for The Comics Journal: The Best Comics of 2024
"...Arctic Play is about being in the world, and then again about the impossibility of folding the repleteness of world experience into discrete forms. The effort is glorious. Mahato has said she aimed “to make a book that would make discomfort feel like a form of care,” and she has succeeded, radically."
Act 3 of Arctic Play is a visual sonnet in which a polar bear—fatigued symbol of the Western-colonial climate crisis—is the love object. The 14 spreads of this act, with ink drawings on the left and layers of carved tissues on the right, enact a puzzle of interspecies longing.