Cracked Shells by Dimitra Charamandas

Prose poetry and drawings by Dimitra Charamandas

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On a spring-like, far-too-warm January morning, I happened upon the magic humpback snail between the pebbles of a small cove. The sea at the gulf stood still as an inland body of water, no meltemi to ripple its surface…

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24-page zine by Swiss-Greek artist Dimitra Charamandas which, through prose poetry fragments and ink drawings, tells of a day spent probing a Greek shoreline’s “little inlets,” i.e. “a collection of potential openings; a small crack, an injury; the result of discharging energy, the rupture of a previously protective shell.”

Cracked Shells establishes the presence of Dimitra sketchbooking on the threshold of sea-slapped slabbed Grecian ground seared and buckling while she meditates on punctured chelonian carapaces, humanity as emigrant panspermia cast across the cosmos, and the slackening blue hour “when even that which is carved in stone ungrips its unambiguity.”

Hear Dimitra read an excerpt from Cracked Shells, recorded in Corfu with the sustained choral backing of incalculable crickets.