If Jesus was an intermittently published poetry and art zine, he very well might have been Backyard Ashes. The publication is impressive on many levels. Visually, it’s pure eye candy. Subscribing to the less is more philosophy, it uses basic B/W copy and simple layout to maximum effect. The text is crisp and the drawings scattered within have a beautifully clean resolution despite their modest means of reproduction. In fact, the layout lends itself well to the prose: bleak, authentic and looking for answers. It seems that the majority of these poems were born of the shadows, as titles like “The Falling Sickness” and “Bury Me” might suggest. However, if you delve a bit deeper, you’ll soon discover that most are merely accounts of such mundane fare as showering or camping, albeit filtered through the damaged lens of the author’s eye. As a whole, the issue has an unsettling quality about it, not unlike a car ride on a dark country road or, to a lesser extent, the episode of Full House where Mr. Bear was accidentally donated to the Crippled Civilians. Things like that just send a tingle up your spine. One last feature that warrants mention is the last-page summary that provides teeny tiny bios about each of the sixteen contributors. It gives background on each individual and frankly, it’s rather fun to try and match up each artist with his or her respective contribution. All in all, Backyard Ashes is a tremendous effort of biblical proportions. Amen. (CG)
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