Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts: These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place therein, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own lives. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips' A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, Stone's comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely her own. Her watercolor panels are filled with anthropomorphic horses and baffled ballerinas that guide the reader through the poet's graphic dreamscape: "I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years... And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand." This book, its own small universe, erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities.

Praise for Patterns by Mita Mahato "It's part vaudeville, part demonstration of how hard it is to really talk and listen, and it's entirely beautiful." \-Paul Constant in The Seattle Review of Books Praise for Sea by Mita Mahato "Her paper-cut style, and topics drawn from her dreams, are both compelling and unique. Feel free to drop the common advice not to share your dreams, if your subconscious does half the work of hers." \-Martin McClellan Mita Mahato is one of handful of artists and writers whose visionary work is defining the new genre of Poetry Comics. In Between is a collection of pieces that bring together simple, elegant expressions of thought and emotion with dreamlike mixed media artworks. There are comics that reflect on grief for a loved one who has died of cancer and others that explore ideas of inspiration and surrealist delight. Others combine whimsical word play with visually absurd witticisms. Each work in this volume stretches the definition of what a comic can be, as well as expectations for how much genuine feeling words and pictures on a page can hold.