Piquant Encounters

By Mika Mollenkopf

A practice of noticing, gathering, and trying to make sense of things.

Rooted in the natural world and shaped by a life of wandering, Piquant Encounters is an ongoing exploration of poetry, art, and the curious terrain of the human experience.

Drawn to the fleeting, the peculiar, and the quietly extraordinary, the project lingers in the spaces where beauty and impermanence meet. A passing light, a half-remembered feeling, the slow decay of something once alive — small, unrepeatable encounters that remind us of our place within an ever-evolving world. A place where the pangs of existence can dance freely.

Here, thoughts take root. Images linger. The ordinary grows strange. Writing and art become ways of nurturing fragments of experience through Mono No Aware, a series of handmade, self-published poetry zines released quarterly with the changing seasons.

After a life of movement, we sit. We contemplate. We even dream of donkeys.

And, in time, we make something of it.

Why Mono No Aware

Mono no aware (物の哀れ) is a Japanese aesthetic concept often translated as “the pathos of things” — a tender, bittersweet awareness of the impermanence of life. It is the ache of noticing that something is beautiful and knowing it will pass.

There is sweetness in this awareness, but sorrow, too. The last light of summer. A memory softening at its edges. The quiet grief of a moment that can only be lived once. To feel mono no aware is to be moved by the passing of things, to recognize that their fragility is inseparable from their beauty.

These zines take their name from that sensibility.

Each volume gathers poems from a season of being — things noticed, felt, imagined, and held for a little while in language. Made by hand and released with the turning seasons, they are small records of what moved through us, what lingered, and what we must eventually let go.

Perhaps making is its own way of tending to this feeling. Not to preserve a moment unchanged, but to meet it while it is here. To make something imperfect, offer it to the world, and accept that even this, too, will pass.

A little sweetness. A little sorrow. Something beautiful, because it cannot stay.