From issue: #30 In at least one dream!
Danit Ariel, 8 May 2026
Rosa Cass’s poem Here I come speaks of sorrow as it is experienced. Instead of presenting a description, or a dictionary definition, Cass holds our hand and guides us through her writing, until the very last moment when the penny drops. Placed in conversation with the poem is Antonia Mayer’s photo series Zahn für Zahn, German for “Tooth for Tooth”. Mayer’s visual language plays with tenderness in texture and ruggedness in content, making space for the spectrum between the two, in a way that resonates with Cass’s writing. Both practitioners bring the emotional realm into focus, softening the audience so we can be ready to grapple with the weight of what they’re sharing. On becoming a mother, Mayer tells me that the world is pure and beautiful through her child’s eyes, the same world she knows to be very brutal, and that it’s her job as a parent to hold those two truths at once. Cass has written to me about how she often feels heavy with love. Maybe this is what Mayer means too. There are also shared sensory triggers and rhythmic elements to Cass’s poem and Mayer’s photo series. In Here I come, the title becomes the invisible last line we can all see, in Zahn für Zahn, Mayer develops a pattern we become familiar with, then breaks it with offbeat images that don’t quite pair up but are somehow still in sync. The two are cyclical, “An inhale, an exhale”, the clear continuum in Mayer’s title, yet each maintains a rupture, a break.
I find it quite astonishing: the similarities between these practices, and in the way these two strangers look at the world. If Cass made images, they might look like Mayer’s; and if Mayer wrote poems, they could read like Cass’s. And I delight in knowing, or feeling, that perhaps there is a deep sense of understanding amongst us humans, even within a culture that tries to convince us otherwise.
Rosa Cass is a poet living on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm (Melbourne). She writes about grief, love, prayer, hands, tongues, eggs, Judaism, beetroot and other things. Her work is a love letter to her ancestors.
Antonia Mayer is a photographer based in Vienna. She uses documentary photography and daily observations as tools to anchor abstract or nuanced complexities within the emotional realm of womanhood. Attempting to visualise and make tangible stories that often don’t have a physical form, Mayer composes in multiple series of nonlinear narratives, encouraging engagement with emotionality which is often left behind in favour of productivity.
