Verses, Tales, Thoughts
by Varsha Panikar
A digital photo-poetry zine that examines the poet's strifes with identity, oppression and mental health, and attempts to draw insight into the dichotomy of dark and light in hopes to start conversations around mental health. The zine was showcased at "Queer Futures Archive" at Parramatta's Riverside Theater, Sydney - as a part of "Burn All The Books That Call You The Unknown" exhibition in 2020.
Coming out soon.
Here's a preview.
Origami Folds is an ongoing series that aim at exploring the curves and folds of the human body (self and others) and use it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless frailty and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, the commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures. Within this stifling framework, the skin has separated from the body, both physically in the act of medical dissection and alterations in an effort to meet popular standards of beauty, and metaphorically in the separation between skin and psyche. The skin here also represents time and wraps us up like cellophane wraps hard candy. Excerpts from the series have been published in Skin, a zine by Forbidden Verses and Brown Bodies, a zine by The Rights Collective in 2021.
Preview.
How can one embrace the future if one is still yearning for the past?
Alone, I walk past my old haunts, the bittersweet entangles. I can no longer recognize them with my sore and weary eyes. Still, I behold the visage of those I’ve chosen to abandon as I moan and ache in silence. They try to reach but I recede. My hands ascend over my head searching for something larger to keep me; the mundane, the mould away. My search persists. The haunts, all vacant; old reveries of memories held dearly no more; they persist, and like nails, they pierce through the skull like hellfire to the soul.
I behold it now, with no control and no vision, just subtle haunting sensation and scourge after scourge, I endure. More and more unsure of whether I’ve reached ashore, or still treading as before.
Nails are sinking in my head.
[From my series, Whispers To My Shadows]
