Litzine, Martin Appleby (editor), issue 2, etsy.com/shop/paperandinkzine, £4.50
Reading the occasional British zine can be an amusing enterprise for North Americans; it’s not every day we get to look up a word like “numpty.” Vocabulary aside, Hastings, Englandbased Paper and Ink — so named, because of its hard-copy-only existence — stands out initially because of its proclivity to tread on stylistic thin ice. Each poem and short story in this issue is presented in a unique and occasionally garish font (more often in the titles than the body text, thank-fully). It’s a potentially disastrous format but somehow manages to work in this case, with the font changes often capturing the differences in mood between the entries. The theme for this edition is “Home,” and there’s no skirting the subject; each piece is explicitly on topic, and provides an intriguing glimpse into the varied ways people choose to define home. For one contributor, it’s a house full of squabbling relatives. For another, there’s no identifiable thing called home — there’s only a vague notion of what it’s supposed to be. This is all perfectly passable poetry and prose, but one contribution stands out: Jennifer Chardon’s “Your Life Is The Story You Keep Telling Yourself,” a series of short prose fragments that she refers to as a “collection of musings.” While the individual pieces appear to be from unconnected narratives, she weaves them together with skillfully-placed segues and shared, relatable themes: turmoil, escape, longing. (Scott Bryson)