Eyes of Apollo: Photographs by Devi Laskar

As a poet and a photographer, I’m always on the lookout for objects or moments that appear one way but spark the imagination and suspend disbelief. I’m always on the lookout to make something anew. The rocks turn into gumballs, a flowering plant blooms into a hooded eye, one of my failed #artaday projects is dismembered and transformed into a mixed-media sun. Each photograph or piece of art here is my attempt at communicating optimism, “the sun will come out tomorrow, ” so keep going, keep writing, keep creating, keep looking around the corner and noticing beauty.

Apollo is the sun god in ancient myth, and of course without the sun shining overhead it would be hard to see or take photographs. I wanted to present these pieces together as a way of honoring what I’ve seen and what remains unseen — and what can look like eyes, but really aren’t eyes at all.

Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, NC. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York, an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former journalist, covering crime and government for daily newspapers. She is also a photographer. Her most recent photograph is featured on the cover of The Florida Review; her photographs have also appeared in The Tiferet Journal and Blue Heron Review recently. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Raleigh Review, which nominated her for Best New Poets 2016. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA/Voices, and recently won first prize in poetry at the 27th Mendocino Coast Writers Conference contest. She now lives in California.