Comics, cut-n-paste zines, essentially textual mediums turned visual to accommodate the lust of a TV people. So I was glad to find Montreal’s Agent. Subtitled “broken word manual”, this well- produced chapbook litzine doesn’t shy away from the visceral — nor does it reduce us to nothing but urge, impulse and emptiness. Find your solace in poetry, I always say, and I gladly delved into Portrait by Julie Crysler — “She was this skinny Polish-American/total/seventies shitbag- looking woman.” A line like that gives me more physical images then a hundred bad reproductions of Sloan live snap-shots. There’s also some great fiction, try Golda Fried’s blue toe nails — “She woke up…with cracker crumbs all over her skin.” Both issues of this litzine feature high-lilt writing, the screams of a generation of young, very fine writers waking up naked in their own backyards. Wonderful.
litzine / Summer and Winter 96 / main creators: Dan Mitchell, Jake Brown, Todd Swift, Andrew Bowers (editors) / $3.50 / 5167 St. Andre, Montreal, QC, H2J 3A6