to say what we see is a project centered on correspondence between Laura Mota-Juang and Sophia Cirignano. Soon after meeting in the Summer of 2025, they began emailing each other poem-letters. Through this exchange, they learned to know each other and to pay attention as a collaborative practice. The first tangible iteration of this project was in the form of a zine—made with sheets created together on Sophia’s balcony in the last days of summer—which they presented at Expozine 2025. Now, alongside the poem-letters, they are working on a collection of portrait poems, where they use their poetic voices to investigate their different perceptions of people after having conversations with them.
Laura Mota-Juang is a Taiwanese-Brazilian shameless experimentalist from São Paulo and based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She's the author of Light Spill (Block Party Press 2023), and co-author of friend/shapes friend/scapes (2024). To read more of her poetry you can go to PRISM International, The Rumpus and boy book club among others. She is currently painting playful creatures on thrifted garments at Atelier No Fiction Projects and organizing events for carte blanche magazine.
Sophia Cirignano is a poet and papermaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. In 2025, supported by a Jeunes Volontaires grant, she created where the well fell to thirst, a handmade artist’s book merging trilingual poetry and experimental rag papermaking. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Headlight Anthology, Yolk Literary Journal, and Columbia Journal, and her debut chapbook Baked Pears was published with Baseline Press in Fall 2026.