Reviews

Review: Resist #50

Mat Resist’s DIY institution, which I first encountered at a Christian alternative music festival held on a former pig farm, hits a milestone. Surviving and thriving in the Anthropocene.

Review: Troll

Troll tells the story of what happens when one never returns from those youthful spelunking expeditions, but instead chooses to live down in the cave with all the bats, snakes and guano.

Review: Grace

Grace is an unflinching dive into the chronic pain of Holly English’s maternal grandmother and how it affected three generations of her family. I expected the story to be about an attempt to heal, instead, it focuses on more of the medical system’s failures.

Review: Girlfriends

Emily Zhou’s stories have a nice edge to them. At their best, they’re tender and have a nice undercurrent of emotion. There’s a resonance in her 20-something protagonists fumbling around, learning the beats and trying to make a go of it.

Review: X: A Novel

This speculative novel provides a window into a fictional New York’s BDSM subculture in an apocalyptic world. Where X shines is in its unique observations.

Review: Nextdoor in Colonialtown

Rivas’s text — which remix actual Nextdoor posts into fictional dialogues — are both hilarious and alarming. Conversational and matter-of-fact, they reveal obsessions with securing their property, scrutinizing minor disturbances, and calling the police.

Review: Larange Enters the Corn Void

Amanda Berlind’s sensibilities come through in her illustrations, which seem to pulse on the page and vibrate to a sonic frequency not normally visible to humans.

Review: Bones

Bones is a joyful, seafoam coloured zine covered in skulls, 70s orange flowers, beautiful brown vines, and white specks of dust.

Review: Artist

Amusing as it is honest, Artist achieves what few can in creating a cultural product about artists that doesn’t fall prey to the temptation to navel gaze or air sour grapes.

Review: My Volcano

J. E. Stintzi’s emulates our distracted and desensitized present with a distant narrative voice, a rash of characters and 232 micro-chapters that rapidly switch between storylines.