A Great Nation’s Art

Canada’s CEO, Stephen Harper has sparked a culture war in the federal election campaign with a claim that “ordinary people” don’t care about arts funding.

We at the Café could understand the Harperian logic of $45 million in cuts to arts and culture funding where less efficient heritage arts programs (as determined by his bean-counters and their economic models) were being trimmed. And we might ask where that money is now going – perhaps to arts ventures with better ROI? To the Calgary Stampede, more likely.

In a bizarre statement yesterday, the Conservative leader and populist hockey dad sans lipstick said average Canadians have no sympathy for “rich” artists who gather at galas to whine about their grants.

“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”

He shrugged off his opponents as elitists preoccupied by “a niche issue.”

Rejecting Harper’s suggestion artists are privileged, Liberal Party leader, Stéphane Dion said their average wage is $23,000 a year.

In a play on the Conservative Party’s French name, an electronic NDP ad running in Montreal’s subway system shows a “Conservateur” logo evolving into “Conserva-tueur de la culture,” or “culture killer.”

Story at Canada’s national rag (don’t miss the comments!), the Globe and Mail

This beleaguered taxpayer is happy to buy some artist a glass of wine, as opposed to the government and corporate collectives where most of our tax dollars get squandered. At least we are not bailing out the Wall Street porkers.

Image: Poor Artist’s Cupboard, Charles Bird King, 1815

Earth Art at the Royal Botanical Gardens

Earlier we blogged about the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy and the phenomenon of earth-sensitive art in a review of art critic John Grande’s book, Balance: Art and Nature

The Royal Botanical Gardens is hosting an Earth Art Exhibit, curated by Grande and sponsored by PRIME Gallery in Toronto. The Royal Botanical Gardens is the largest botanical garden in Canada within the Niagara Escarpment — a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve.

Earth Art is also known as ephemeral art or environmental art, which has evolved from our growing environmental consciousness. The Gardens’ Earth Art exhibit showcases renowned Canadian and international artists who use natural materials and plants to create inspiring one-of-a-kind installations.

Earth Art began in the late 1960s with the seminal Robert Smithson piece known as Spiral Jetty. Created with a bulldozer on the shore of Great Salt Lake in Utah, his raised earthwork sculpture spirals in on itself — an utterly useless jetty on a half-dead lake. It can be seen as both beautiful and as a comment on the ultimate futility of our attempts to bend nature to our will.

Of the Earth Art exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Grande states that we are no longer in the age of such vast earth-moving projects. For the past 25 years, artists have been developing a more intimate approach to site and environment, which celebrates the harmonious union of artists working with materials found from the land, and creating a new sense of wonder, illusion and place. Truth to materials remains an axiom, but here we have the injection of ethics in the decision of which materials to use. And many variables play a role in outdoor nature-based art, including weather, climate, vegetation, other living species, the quality of light, and the seasons. What follows is exciting and dramatic.

Emilie Brzezinski has created a stand of willow trunks within a Stonehenge of gnarled old cherry trees at the Royal Botanical Gardens. It is entitled Willow Winds.

“Having found trunks of corkscrew willow for my installation, I felt, above all, I was to respect the wood. For this reason, I didn’t use my usual format of vertical wedges to carve the trunks. Rather I used the remarkable array of joyful and bubbly bark, characteristic of the old trees of this species, to speak for itself. The ‘human input’ focuses on the upward thrusts of the trunks to make up the gestures of the composition. Thus, the sculpture is in large part a found object that has been adapted to my sculptural needs.”

Yolanda Gutierrez has placed plants and relics around a grand old pin oak in the Arboretum for an installation called Abuelo Arbol (Grand Father Tree).

“The point is the tree — a 150-year-old pin oak. I want to help people remember what the tree means for ancient cultures. For the First Nations Aztec in Mexico and the Iroquois in Ontario, the tree is the connection between earth and sky. Imagine the tree as a conduit through which energy spirals up from the earth and down from the sky. The Iroquois would carve a mask or face in the tree and perform rituals and dances around it to bring it energy and a spiritual presence. In this installation, the spiral patterns of the movement of energy in the ground involve complementary opposites, always in movement. The earth rows follow the outer lines of the spiral designs with healing plants — sweet grass, tobacco and sage — planted in them. The white painted sticks rise in height to suggest the spirals, while spiralling white flowers appear on the tree trunk itself.”

Sharon Loper’s exhibit, Nests, comprises synthesized hummingbird nests. Two oversized, fabricated hummingbird nests, ranging from 0.6 to 1.5 metres in height, are constructed from metal bars, wire, hemp hair, cotton batting, and gathered natural material. Loper states, “The nest represents nature in its most perfect symbolism, in that the nest is shelter, an enclosure, a safe place where life is sustained. We all live in a time when hyper-reality is the norm. The nest brings us back to less complicated values and uses nature as a vehicle. The nest is a window, a place where life begins.”

Deep in the woodland glade, Bob Verschueren has created XIII/08.

“Since 1978, my arts practice has been entirely oriented towards nature, using nature’s bounty as material and as the source for my inspiration. Using vegetation involves working with living material and time. Each installation is a metaphor for the fragility of the human condition. My installation, XIII/08, consists of three large urns out of which flow white fir branches, signifying that the landscape of Hamilton is punctuated by waterfalls. These waterfalls are, for me, the perfect expression of the continuing flux of life.”

Reflections Flowing is a site sculpture that touches the earth lightly, if at all. Roy Staab, who created the installation in Grindstone Creek Marsh and who is shown during the installation, says, “I think about being ‘in tune’ with nature. In this work, I use an S-curved line and consider the length of open water for its size. It is made of fragile vegetation gathered from the Royal Botanical Gardens — phragmite reeds and saplings that are invasive yet wonderful for making my art. The reeds are interlaced into the saplings. The quiet area of Grindstone Creek Marsh permits my art to almost be a part of nature, especially when reflected in the water. It is vulnerable in the stream, for a moment of life.”

In the Arboretum, Nils-Udo’s installation, Towards Nature, brings together four earth ramps that lead into the inner areas of a tree.

“The ramps are of varying lengths, the longest being about 12 metres. These bridges move from the earth upwards. Visually, they are illusionary, symbolizing our unconscious links to nature. The bridges act as a visual point of entry into the tree and are covered with plants, earth and grasses. The tree is central to all of this. Towards Nature is yet another metaphor, to illustrate this theme, as with many of my works, of that artificial gap between human culture and nature, and so this series of bridges toward nature. These are bridges between nature and humanity, and my art seeks to bring us integrally closer.”

Ground is a powerful installation by local artist, Simon Frank.

“In an earlier work, Sketch for New Forest, I used oak sawdust and shavings, the waste material created when an oak tree is transformed into lumber, to ‘draw’ a full-sized oak tree on a gallery floor — temporarily returning the material to its original form. With Ground, I use a similar material, tree mulch, but with an opposite intent — to obscure or erase the form of a dying ash tree by burying the tree beneath the material/memory of other trees. Set in one of the avenues of trees in the Arboretum, Ground also playfully echoes and exaggerates both the topography of the site and the ubiquitous mounds of mulch placed around the base of many of the trees by the gardeners.”

With all of these installations, Grande has brilliantly presented us, strolling the beautiful gardens and natural areas, with interventions where a corner is turned, and we are suddenly confronted with a piece of environmental art that plucks a deep string in the human heart.

Visit the Royal Botanical Gardens website for images of the works in progress.

For more amazing environmental art, visit the Green Museum and its blog. This is an online museum. They do not have a physical space filled with a bulky art collection. Instead, as an online museum, their strategy for sharing environmental art reflects their values. They have a very small ecological footprint and can display a wide range of art works from around the globe and include directions so you can visit exhibitions and events first-hand. They are like a traditional museum turned inside out. Instead of visiting one big box filled with art they are many tiny boxes (monitors) encouraging visitors to go out to experience art in the context of their communities and ecosystems.

Another non-traditional museum is the Nomadic Museum, which travels from venue to venue. Its current exhibit is of stunning photography relating humanity and nature: Ashes and Snow.

For Outi

Cate Kerr’s blog: Beyond the Fields We Know

Cate Kerr’s photographs and haiku

The Impossibility of Translating Poetry

When work took Erin Moure to Montreal for the first time in 1984, she admits that she could “barely cope” with the language.

Early last year, with poet/novelist/playwright Robert Majzels, she embarked on a French-to-English translation of Cahier de roses et de civilisation, a 2003 book by Nicole Brossard, one of Quebec’s most important poets. It took her and Majzels almost three months to complete the project, published last fall by Toronto’s Coach House Books as Notebook of Roses and Civilization.

The 88-page volume has gone on to be short-listed for the 2007 Governor-General’s Award for translation. And in April, it was one of three texts nominated for the Canadian side of the Griffin Prize.

Moure is hardly a stranger to Brossard’s work. Notebook of Roses and Civilization is the third Brossard translation she and Majzels have completed. Nor is Moure a stranger to writing poetry. She has been nominated for seemingly every Canadian poetry prize, including two nods, in 2002 and 2006, for the Griffin, and five for the Governor-General’s award, in a writing career spanning more than 30 years.

Translation is a fraught exercise, of course. As Moure notes, “Languages aren’t equivalent. The register even of the word ‘I’ and ‘je’ is so different. You think of these things as equivalent on a practical basis, from day to day … but day-to-day language is not as precise as the use of language in poetry.”

And in the case of Brossard’s work, there are “challenges because she has a kind of tone and register, on what we call the macro and micro level, that we have to maintain.” Plus, Brossard does things in French that are “syntactically strange that we have to find a way of doing in English as well.”

While Notebook of Roses and Civilization “is necessarily different from the book in French,” Moure stressed that she and her collaborator tried “to stick very, very closely to providing the same experience to a reader in English as a reader in French – inasmuch as that is possible because readers bring to texts their culture.”

Brossard, 65 this year, has won at least two Governor-General’s awards in French-language poetry. Yet her fierce rejection of conventions of grammar, punctuation, narrative and logic, of what’s been called “the natural speech lyric,” have made her a sort of “poet’s poet.”

For Moure, the fact that today’s so-called common reader often doesn’t “understand a lot of contemporary poetry at the get-go” is a quibble. “We don’t demand this of life itself. Find me someone who understands life. I’m 53, and I don’t understand it. I understand certain things; I have certain reference points. I get through the day and I love it – but something always happens to throw me for a loop.

Excerpted from James Adams, Globe and Mail, June 4, 2008

A Beautiful Sentence

Beauty, in a sentence, is as difficult to describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. If you are even thinking in these terms – that is, if you are even considering what might constitute strong vigorous, energetic, and clear sentences – you are already far in advance of wherever you were before you were conscious of the sentence as something deserving our deep respect and enraptured attention.

Consider the sentence that begins Samuel Johnson’s brief biography, The Life of Savage.

It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality only been more conspicuous than others, not more frequent, or more severe.

The quality that this sentence shares with all good sentences is clarity. Between its initial capital letter and its final period are 134 words, ten commas, and three semicolons, and yet the average reader, or at least the reader who has the patience to read and consider every word, will have no trouble understanding what Doctor Johnson is saying.

Despite its length, the sentence is economical. To remove even one word would make it less lucid and less complete, as Johnson takes an observation so common as to have become a cliché (money and fame don’t by themselves make us happy) and turns it, then turns it again, considering the possible explanations, the reasons why this perception may be true or merely appear to be true. The sentence combines a sort of magisterial authority with an almost offhand wit, in part because of the casual ease with which it tosses off sweeping philosophical generalizations (“great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages”, “the general lot of mankind is misery”) compressed into subordinate clauses, as if the truth of these statements is so obvious to both the writer and the reader that there is no need to pause over these pronouncements, let alone give them sentences of their own.

Possibly the principal reason why the sentence so delights us is that to read it is to take part in the process – the successive qualifications and considerations – of thought itself, of a lively mind at work. Finally, the cadence and rhythm of the sentence are as measured and pleasing as those of poetry or music.

Excerpted from Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, HarperCollins, 2006

Image from Word Rogues

Saving the Semicolon

It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations – to name no names – tend to reserve for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they’re lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one’s profession as “thinker”.

That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought”.

Philippe Djian, best known outside France as the author of 37°2 le matin, which was brought to the cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Beneix as Betty Blue and successfully launched Beatrice Dalle on an unsuspecting world, goes one step further: he would like nothing better than to go down in posterity, he claims, as “the exterminating angel of the point-virgule”. Objectionable English-language typesetting practices, as used by most of the world’s computers, are also to blame for the semicolon’s decline, its defenders argue.

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that – in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur – “the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought”.

The semicolon, continues this sadly anonymous defender of the Gallic grammatical faith, “finds its rightful home in the subtlety of a fine and rich analysis, one which is not afraid to pronounce – and sometimes to withhold – judgment where mere affirmation might be found wanting. It allows the writer to link ideas without breaking a train of thought; by contrast, over-simplified communication and bald, efficient discourse whose simplistic style is the best guarantee of being widely understood is naturally wary of this punctuation mark.”

“You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.”

~ George Bernard Shaw to T.E. Lawrence

How, though, are you supposed to use the thing? According to the eminently readable rules of French grammar, the semicolon has several specific applications. First, it allows a writer to introduce a logical balance into a long phrase. Second, it can serve to divide two phrases that are in themselves independent, but whose significance is in some way linked (viz: “The semicolon is necessary; I have just proved it,” or, as Michel Houellebecq, one of the very few contemporary French writers to use the point-virgule, would have it: “He was unable to remember his last erection; he was waiting for the storm.”) It can also, more prosaically, be used to separate the various elements of an enumeration or list (or indeed to separate groups of similar elements linked by commas within a longer list). Finally, a semicolon can replace a comma when “the use of the latter might prove confusing”.

For Sylvie Prioul, a subeditor at the Nouvel Obs and author of La Ponctuation ou l’art d’accommoder les textes, the gradual disappearance of the ; is, above all, a natural consequence of France’s regrettable recent tendency, under the nefarious influence of ever-encroaching English, to reduce the length of its sentences.

“People just don’t know how to use it any more. It’s a strange mix between a comma and a full stop. Sometimes it’s closer to the comma; that’s what we used to call the ’strong comma’ in the 18th century. Sometimes it’s closer to a full stop; we use it when we change idea.”

Michel Volkovitch, author, poet and translator, is another ardent defender. “The point-virgule is precious when the subject matter is complex,” he says. “For constructing a piece properly, distinguishing themes, sections and sub-sections – in short, for dissipating any haziness or imprecision of thought. It puts things in order, it clarifies. But it’s precious, too, for adding a little softness, a little lightness; it can stop a sentence from touching the ground, from grinding to a halt; keeps it suspended, awake. It is a most upmarket punctuation mark.”

Excerpted from Jon Henley at The Guardian

Wikipedia

Abecedarian humour

Ashes and Snow

“In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”
—Gregory Colbert, Creator of Ashes and Snow

Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project that weaves together photographic works, 35mm films, art installations and a novel in letters. Included in the exhibit are over 50 large-scale photographic artworks, a 60-minute film, and two 9-minute film haikus. With profound patience and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals, he has captured extraordinary interactions between humans and animals.

His 21st-century bestiary includes more than 40 totemic species from around the world. Since he began creating his singular work of Ashes and Snow, Colbert has mounted more than 30 expeditions to locations such as India, Egypt, Burma, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, the Azores, and Borneo.

Located in the world’s only “nomadic” museum – built temporarily and specially for Ashes and Snow out of 148 abandoned shipping containers – this installation features Colbert’s massive, sepia-toned portraits on handmade Japanese paper, some up to 10 feet in length, of humans interacting with animals like elephants, cheetahs, and manatees.

Colbert originally conceived of the idea for a sustainable travelling museum in 1999. He envisioned a sustainable structure that could easily be assembled in ports of call around the world, providing a transitory environment for Ashes and Snow on its global journey.

The show first opened at the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, in 2002 and is charted to travel the globe with no final destination. The Nomadic Museum, the travelling home of Ashes and Snow, debuted in New York (March to June 2005) and then travelled to Santa Monica (January to May 2006), and Tokyo (March to June 2007). The show is mounted in Mexico City in January 2008.

The title Ashes and Snow suggests beauty and renewal, while also referring to the literary component of the exhibition—a fictional account of a man who, over the course of a yearlong journey, composes 365 letters to his wife. The source of the title is revealed in the 365th letter. Colbert’s photographs and one-hour film loosely reference the traveller’s encounters and experiences described in the letters.

These mixed media photographic works marry umber and sepia tones in a distinctive encaustic process on handmade Japanese paper. The artworks, each approximately five feet by eight feet, are mounted without explanatory text so as to encourage an open-ended interaction with the images.

Colbert wants to remove the artificial barriers between man and animals, returning to an Eden-like point in time when the world was supposedly “one”. By presenting each image as a “poetic filmstudy” he’s trying to communicate the idea that nature doesn’t have a “style” but a “voice”.

Ashes and Snow has no final destination, and the nomadic museum will continue to travel to points around the globe, each exhibit being simply a “port of call”.

Ashes and Snow

The following excerpt is entitled Feather to Fire, and is narrated in three languages by Laurence Fishburne (English), Ken Watanabe (Japanese), and Enrique Rocha (Spanish).

Laika: The Dog That Touched the Stars

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”
~~ Oleg Georgivitch Gazenko, 1998

There was really a dog named Laika, and she touched the stars 50 years ago. Laika was the abandoned Russian puppy who was destined to become Earth’s first space traveler.

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union made headlines and history when they launched Sputnik II into orbit around the earth. The satellite had a passenger: a brown and white mutt named Laika.

Nick Abadzis brings her story to life in a haunting and bittersweet graphic novel, Laika, published by First Second Books. In 200 pages, he manages to portray the Russian attitude toward space conquest at the time, the grueling schedule that the scientists were forced to follow, and the heartbreaking decisions that the trainers of the dogs in the program had to make.

Laika began her life as the unwanted offspring of a highborn lady’s dog. Given to a boy as an “attitude change,” she was locked up and abused before being thrown away. A series of events led Kudryuvka (Laika’s original name) to Yelena Dubrovsky, the trainer with the Russian space program. Both Yelena and Dr. Gazenko began to understand the sacrifice that both the dogs and the people involved in the space program were asked to make during the Space Race between Russia and the US.

The graphic novel opens with scenes of the frozen Russian gulag and a man named Korolev. Eighteen years later, he is the Chief Designer of Sputnik. Buoyed by the success of the successful launch, Prime Minister Khrushchev demands that his space program launch a second orbital vehicle within a single month…this time, with a living creature on board.

Laika, one of many dogs at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, has been trained for flight travel. She bonds immediately with her caretaker Yelena Alexandrovna Dubrovsky and endears herself to the other scientists as well. No dog is better suited for space travel, and Laika is slated to make a trip from which she will never return.

Laika dies five hours after she is launched on Sputnik II. Unlike later missions, no provision was made to ensure her safe return.

The historical facts of Laika’s life and the characters that surround her were exhaustively researched. There’s Sergei Korolev, the head of the program, whom we meet as he is walking out of one of Stalin’s gulags, whence he had been banished in the great purges, and who becomes a driven monster, forever scarred by Siberia. There’s Yelena Dubrovksy, the space medicine program’s animal handler, who has a preternatural ability to connect with the space-dogs, but who is also a scientist and Party member who is clear-eyed in confronting their eventual fate.

For the most part Abadzis maintains a simplified cartoon style. At moments of great importance, however, he renders the figure of Laika more three-dimensional. As Laika sits in the red light of her capsule, mere moments before takeoff, she becomes highly realistic. Sometimes scenes are black and white, like stills from a movie. Other times they are two page spreads that drill home the wonder or the horror of a given moment. And in dreams, the lines that make up a panel grow soft and colourful.

Abadzis talks to Jeff Vandermeer at Amazon.com about making the graphic novel:

I’d known it was a good story since I was about six years old. It had always been at the back of my mind as a story to tell. In 2002, new information came to light about the Sputnik II mission and specifically Laika’s death. That was the spark. Why a graphic novel? Well, comics are my language. It’s the medium that I’m most familiar and comfortable…so it was first choice.

I had no idea there were so few Soviet engineers and scientists involved in the nascent space program — not to trivialize their incredible achievement but, in many senses, they just winged it, borne along in great part by Korolev’s force of will and political manoeuvering. Also it was interesting to find out how much the Soviet scientists cared for their cosmodogs. Events conspired to make Laika a sacrificial passenger on board Sputnik II, but they really did honour their canine cosmonauts. There’s even a statue of Laika in Moscow. Perhaps this book will go some small way to re-establishing her position in history: whatever the circumstances, and whether you agree with what they did or not, she was the first earthling in orbit around this planet.

I could have done with another hundred pages. But I’d taken a bit of time to write and thumbnail it and when that stage was finished, the publisher and I realized that the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launches was fast approaching. When I first pitched the idea to Mark Siegel at First Second, neither of us realized that it was so close. It felt like we needed to be a part of that, so I drew it extremely fast–two hundred pages in a little over eight months. It’s an understatement to say that it was extremely hard work. What got left out was a longer explication of Laika’s origins; the scenes with Mikhail, her first owner were much longer…. Originally, I did have an idea of doing three books: Laika would be the first, Gagarin the second, and a full-on comic strip biography of Korolev would be the final part that would bind together events seen in the first two. Maybe one day.

I suppose it would have been easy to make it another overly saccharine dead-dog story but that wouldn’t have been true either to my taste or to the socio-political system and culture I was attempting to portray. Laika — the real Laika — was a cute dog, as photographs attest. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize her, at least not to the extent that she was spouting speech and thought balloons like Tintin’s Snowy. It’d be disingenuous to suggest that, in dealing with a true story that involves dogs and their owners (even if they happen to be scientists in a Soviet cosmodog program), there wouldn’t be a bit of emotion. There’s plenty (and I hope the reader feels it). But there’s also the harsh reality of the time, the place and the confluence of events that put Laika into space.

When Comrade Yelena visits Laika for one last time she can hear the dog saying her name with every bark, even when Yelena is too far away to hear them. She dreams that Laika is calling out to her for help.

No one can walk away from this book untouched.

Excerpt at First Second Books

Review at Readaboutcomics

Interview with Abadzis at Animal Inventory

Interview with Abadzis at Comics Reporter

Aaron George Bailey’s Laika website

BBC News: What Happened to Laika

Interviews at BBC News: The World