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May Zine Reading, Part 3

There is a short stack of zines for today and I realize that I've missed an opportunity--Backyard Zine Fest 2021: Spring! Reading in the morning has been awesome and I'm lucky to have been able to do it. Now there's going to be the crazy heat of summer to get through, but fall might be a fun time to have another several days reading in the morning and crafting in the afternoon (that's the next post). I'll be on the lookout for fall zines to add to my collection and maybe do the reading over Halloween weekend? 


I've been collecting books for a few months now: everything goes in the Zine Basket so that I don't lose track of smaller pieces. The zine basket is now empty (except for the craft notebooks) and my poetry shelf is slightly fuller. Time to start preparing for the fall! :) This was how the basket looked when I started today's reading, which included the longest book in the collection.  I had a more varied response than the on the previous two days although it was still a great reading day, if overwhelming.



I began with Willow Sedam's "i found a universe in the leaf litter" and was transported back to my Aunt Lois's home in Brownsville, going through an Easter basket carefully stocked with books in addition to toys (Aunt Lois was a teacher & had good taste in books). I enjoyed the black & white drawings and the poems from an invertebrate POV. My favorite was "centipede" for the unexpected image of care and the way "paper wasp" gave me a tiny bit of empathy for the wasps that startle me in the yard. This feels like something you could share with a child who was into bugs.


Next up, I read Days (photos by Matt Westphal, writing by Hannah Greer). This was a full-color book of photos in an unnamed neighborhood of empty pools, cars tucked into the landscape, and various street scenes. The photos brimmed with light and were generally full of a familiar but sometimes overlooked loveliness. The text read as if I was receiving random texts from a friend but there wasn't enough of it to give the impression of a narrative. I would have liked more organization here, a narrative of a day or a visit to follow. I enjoyed the images but expected more from the text (more text, generally), which would help alleviate the growing impression that these are potential stock images (which, honestly, would have made a great title). 


And then, Brian Flaherty's Call & Response, Issue 1. Really enjoyed this one!! This was an interesting format: a piece of art (text or image) was submitted and then passed on to another artist for a response piece to be displayed beside the original (the call and the response). There were several pieces that stood out to me, including "Resolution 1/2," consisting of a poem followed by an photo. The poem was vibrant and the image hit me as if I'd gone down on my knees afterward (poem: Krupa Harishankar, photo: Zeshawn Ali). Lucyanne Randall's "A Few Capitals" and Austin Antione's "**The Cross-Country Road Trip You Never Thought You Needed Until You Read This...**" felt like the beginning to a Phantom Tollbooth/China Mieville mash-up I want to read right now. I enjoyed all of this.

My Response: The only lace left for the scavenging angels lines our nicest underthings//Sleep strikes like a falcon in medieval jess//A mummery of belief is laced too tight to dance//So we gather feathers, sharpen the unpardonable, gather sticks, and begin to fletch.


I had completely forgotten that I also picked up Call & Response, Issue #9, April 2020. Here is where things start to slip. Although I enjoyed issue 1 (and haven't read the intervening issues), Issue #9 feels less like a conversation and more like a literary magazine. There were two longer stories that didn't seem to be part of this conversational format. It wasn't what I was expecting & that probably affected my reading. 


And so we come to the last book, which I was specifically saving: Jackie Wang's The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void. This is a book that I plan on re-reading, as reading it in one go was TOO MUCH. It's a thick book of poems, many prose poems, in the disorienting language of dream description. Each poem read as if where another dream, dropping away from waking life into scenarios that echoed each other (if you read them back-to-back), crossed back upon themselves, and from which phrases would break off to become brief tangles of illustrations that functioned (for me) as call-back memories of longer pieces. I liked the way the poems garbled themselves--dreams are often unexplainable in terms of the emotional resonance, at least for me--as this echoes the reality that I can't parse all of these poems, that I'll only ever grasp a piece of them or I'll make this a piece of something in my life. A fascinating collection that bears re-reading. 


And now, crafty afternoon. :) Or a nap. A nap sounds good. Tomorrow, the results of the crafty afternoons!

-- chrissa

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