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."
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.