Perpetual

The power of water is the power of blood, flood and drought. Water keeps it real, keeps us real. Forgetting this, we turn the earth into a toxic dump. Remembering this, we unfurl the future as perpetual possibility.

Water is also the strength of subtlety, quietly making its way through your body. perpetual is both a gift and a warning from water. Through drawings and graphic essays by artist Cindy Mochizuki and writer Rita Wong, the book visits some key sites where people have sabotaged themselves by desecrating water: the Pacific Ocean, the tar sands leaking into the Athabasca River, the historical salmon streams buried in sewers under Vancouver's streets, pressing to be daylighted...

perpetual draws strength from the rivers that still flow wild, like the Fraser River, and from friendships made along the way in journeys with and for water. The book is a response to Dorothy Christian's call to protect sacred waters. Humble and holy, water shows us a way to make peace and ethics, if we have the heart and spirit to learn.

Rita Wong is the author of four books of poetry: monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai) and undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). forage was the winner of the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Canada Reads Poetry 2011. Wong is an associate professor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver.

Cindy Mochizuki's illustrative work has appeared in West Coast Line, Front magazine and Alternatives Journal. Her short films and exhibitions, including AIR 475 (2014), have been screened both domestically and internationally. She currently lives in Vancouver, where received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.