You Live For the Fight When That’s All You’ve Got

This zine is as promising as its silk-screened cover teases. The text weaves in and out of words written by hand and words pounded out of a typewriter. Some of the content is excerpted right out of Ciara Xyerra’s journals. Having traveled extensively, the zine is brimming with stories told from the window of a Greyhound bus, although the author’s decisions to pack up and go sometimes bring sadness to the page when hitting the road doesn’t always work out. The author tells of her thoughts of suicide, her father’s death, her relationship with her mother, and shares some postcards that tell more travel tales. What keeps this zine from becoming self-absorbed (which personal zines sometimes tend to do) is the beauty of the writing. Xyerra writes of walking like a “woman underwater” to see her father before he is cremated. The punk rock houses she drifts to and from and the alleyways and song lyrics that shape her life all flow off the page flawlessly, making this zine full of compulsive reading. (Liz Worth)

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