Bryan Mariano on nature-culture relations in text and imagery

MS Geography graduate student Bryan Joel Mariano's works are featured recently in The Tiger Moth Review -- a journal of art and literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology. His research interests traverse geohumanities and ecocriticism. 

Bryan's photo essay entitled Urban Natures was published in the January 19 blog and talks about nature mindfulness, the act of noticing, and the meshworks of everyday life. It features snapshots of quotidian spaces where lifeforms thrive and prosper despite, or because of, dereliction brought about by the global lockdown. New forms flourish, almost unnoticed because we are steeped in the manicured and the disciplined caretaking of more-than-humans. 

In the January 12 issue of the journal, Bryan's poem -- Forest Over Limestone -- enables the liminal and interstitial that, like most postcolonial poems, elide the linear and ordered to visibilise what Nobel Prize-winning French poet Saint-John Perse calls 'erasable poem' -- fragile utterances threatened by lacuna.

*Photo credits: BJMariano

TJ Cipriano reflects on granular lockdowns in light of the Delta surge in the metropolis

Timothy James Cipriano provides a compelling and persuasive report on the implementation of Covid directives coming from the state government versus what's going on in local communities. Granular lockdowns, Cipriano insists, are ineffective if there is no effective policy of contact tracing exacerbated by half-hearted public health interventions.

TJ Cipriano is an MS Geography student currently writing his masters thesis on the right to the city in disaster risk reduction.