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 teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: http://downstream.ecuad.ca/ .

Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/rrrwong.

Rita Wong's profile page

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, drawings and community-engaged projects. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its complex relationships to site-specificity, the transpacific, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. Her artistic process is often research-based and moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, performativity, chance, and improvisation. She has worked extensively on a large body of work that is informed by and within Japanese Canadian communities in B.C and Japan. In these projects she works with members of these communities and often includes her paternal family’s history both within the internment camps and their experiences as repatriated Japanese Canadians in Japan in the post war.

Cindy Mochizuki's profile page