As part of International Zine Month, we’ll be posting a zine review a day on our blog in July. Today’s review is from Issue 5.
poetry zine / 30 pages / Tim Lander / $2 / Box 996, Naniamo, BC, V9R 5N2
“There are some things/we can not say/the simplest words/drift beyond our reach/blunted with experience/loaded down with uncomfortable memory/and where I come from/a fellow does not talk/about his mother…” So begins Old Man Zine, subtitled The Caterpillar On the Leaf. The title, one supposes, is meant to conjure up the solitude of a living creature surrounded by all this possible greatness. And so this is an autobiographical story, a sad one, poverty, failure and, overall, a desperate sense of time passing. Really a moving long poem whose cadence of reflection is a welcome counterpoint to the shallow immediacy of perspective of most zines and lives lived.