Tag: Zine Review

Little Free Archive: Water-Kin by Mahaila Smith

April 29th, 2025

I love the ideas of solarpunk, but I’ll be honest — despite every idea in it appealing to me, I’ve had a hard time getting into the actual body of work. Some of this is a personal aversion to utopias. Solarpunk tends to prioritize positive ways forward over the dystopic futures of cyberpunk; this is excellent, but not how my creative mind tends to work. I distrust utopias so much that I can’t sit still long enough when presented with one to stop going ‘okay so what’s the catch?’.

That’s why I’m immediately impressed with Water-Kin, a poetry collection-slash-verse narrative that doesn’t advertise itself as solarpunk, but might be my favourite example of the genre yet. Mahaila Smith, one of the co-editors for Sprawl Mag, is both a gifted poet and satirist, and the collection starts off with upfront satire before stepping back, bit by bit, and resolving into a multi-generational tale. I hesitate to use the word ‘uplifting’ in this day and age, but it really is.

I’m also always deeply pleased by poetry that’s clearly meant to be read aloud and almost dances off to the page to insist on it. Not all of the poetry in here is like that, but many of the standouts are, including my personal favourite ‘Hi! I am your Cortical Update!’

I’m so shy!!!
I drink wine as long as the moon crosses the sky.
I follow directions from a ten-year-old.
I write words on any blank piece of skin, until I am blue blue.
I subvert zombies, drugged into rasping stasis.
I stuff hungry vampires with rejected manuscripts.
–Excerpt from ‘Hi! I am your Cortical Update!’

My other favourite is one I think is worth not spoiling, but it made me coo over the page like I’d been presented with a three-week-old kitten. If you like solarpunk/biopunk and verse narrative, and want to support an indie queer poet, definitely check this one out.

“But Elliott,” you say, “you put this on Little Free Archive!” AND SO I DID. Because — while I was lucky enough to get a beautiful paper copy — you can read this chapbook for free from Metatron Press. You can also read more about Smith’s work on their website here, including their upcoming full-length collection Seed Beetle from Stelliform Press!

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The Gremlin’s Library: Secrets Inside Cabling by Calliope Neurotoxin

January 28th, 2025

TW: The zine being reviewed, and to a lesser extent the review itself, features themes of self-harm, self-mutilation, extremely creative violence, post-apocalypse civilization, and — mostly metaphorically – gender dysphoria. Also drug use, child abuse and mass death.

Have I told you lately I really love horror? Has it come up enough that I really really love horror? I think I’ve been too normal about it. Good news! This will change because I am about to be EXTREMELY NOT NORMAL about ‘Secrets Inside Cabling’ by Calliope Neurotoxin. This is another zine from WBMC (Wiggle Bird Mailing Club), which seems to be hitting nothing but perfect strikes. Literally the only reason I’m currently unsubscribed is because Patreon and the gods hate me, and it means I’m MISSING OUT on the December zine. Everything is terrible.

Anyway, ‘Secrets Inside Cabling’ is a litzine — a short story wrapped inside a zine, in unfortunately-small font (such is the joy of zine-making, I guess). It’s partly illustrated, and about humanity’s attempt to build a “physical god”, then promptly abandoned in low Earth orbit. The Earth here is a devastated wreck of its former self, and all the space technology is a wreck, too; we’re far enough in the future that even the promised future has come and gone. It’s a gutwrenching setting that inspires a kind of existential depression — we are, it seems, at the end of everything.

I won’t say much more than that, because honestly, this zine is a fucking experience and I don’t want to take that away from you. It’s gory, nauseating, and horrifying in both the little details (it’s important to dig. dig through, and for, what? you’ll find out.) and its broader storytelling (the idea of breeding pilots for the purposes of flying Something isn’t new, but that’s part of what makes the sparseness so good — we can fill in certain dots, and others take us by surprise). The violence isn’t just violent, but refreshingly so; there’s no mundane gun violence or run-of-the-mill sexual assault here. No, we’re talking acid dissolution and brain spikes, cocaine grown from mold and more — all in, I really must stress, a 20-page zine short story. Unbelievable. Calliope Neurotoxin, when you write a full length novel or game or short story collection, I will be at the door on release day Fry-style going “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY”.

Anyway. If you want to buy the zine, even after its specialized release on WBMC, you can buy it here! To sign up for Wiggle Bird Mailing Club, check them out on Patreon over here.

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The Gremlin’s Library (Rerun Post): “press ctrl-alt-delete” by Vanessa Maki

January 8th, 2025

Our rerun post today is an old zine review, this time from Vanessa Maki! Full text below:

What does it mean to start over? What does it mean to reset the system, to reboot the software of your own mind? Vanessa Maki’s powerful poetry chapbook press ctrl – alt – del engages with this question with incredible grace and bluntness in equal measure. The chapbook carries the metaphor of a filing system throughout, with some files deleted and hanging around the ‘recycle bin’, and poems having names like ‘LOVE.exe’ and metaphors about admin control.

control is the slight luxury / when you happen to be admin / i configure /i install / i have
control / control of body /

-“ADMIN”, pg 4 of ‘press ctrl – alt – del’, Vanessa Maki

I thoroughly enjoyed the poems in this chapbook, both under their own power and how they link with each other. It’s one thing to write a collection of poetry and another to make that collection cohesive. The same motifs repeat, never all at once; bitter fruit, broken glass, storm warnings and system shutdowns cycle around the poems, uniting to form an uneasy see-saw between the organic and the artificial. It circles back to oppression – to being traumatized, mentally ill, black, queer, a woman – and the constant balance of untangling what is ‘natural’, what is ‘real’, what is learned.

Of particular note are the final three lines of the chapbook.

i have no idea what it’d be like
to be a fully functioning system
that never needs constant repairs.

-B.S.O.D., pg 23, Vanessa Maki

While my marginalizations are largely different, this is a sentiment that lands, and lands hard. Being marginalized and traumatized in an oppressive system feels, most of the time, like a constant experiment in jury-rigging complex fixes with tape and glue. We survive day-to-day, waiting for the next big hit.

Vestigial to the chapbook itself but nevertheless part of the download file and the project, the image poems that come along with the chapbook expand on the theme. Each of them are short, fitting into a pop-up alert box that draws on older versions of Windows. While all of these are excellent, “DOWNLOAD ME” i think is some of the purest expression of the theme. Others expand further on the unhealthy relationship that weaves its way through Maki’s poetry, and all of them are further illustrated with pixelated icons. A skull and crossbones, a piece of pizza, a recycling logo.

One thing that I would have liked to have seen with this chapbook is interactivity – the format, with the dialogue boxes and talk of a system, teases at it but doesn’t fully follow through. It would be fascinating to see the disparate pieces of the chapbook put together in something like Twine or another digital-humanities interface.

Unfortunately time marches on; I’ve removed the buy link from this version of the post since it seems this chapbook isn’t for sale anymore (although I’m sure if you’re super interested, Maki would love to hear it) and X is basically a graveyard of accounts. But Vanessa Maki is still very much around and writing – her Payhip and other works are over here; and she can now be found on Bluesky over here!

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The Gremlin’s Library: Back to School by Rudy Brumm

January 2nd, 2025

Are you signed up for Wiggle Bird Mailing Club? You should be! WBMC is a monthly zine club and I’ve reviewed zines from them before. This time around, it’s a short comic about art school and nudity in art called Back To School, by Rudy Brumm.

“Back to School” features two art school dropouts who find out a third of their group has broken their pact and re-enrolled. She claims to be changing hearts and minds, particularly on her chosen topic of “nudity in art” – but of course it’s never that simple.

First of all, I love the art style of this. It’s one of those deliberately exaggerated, over-the-top cartoon styles that does so much to communicate personality and character. Brumm’s style reminds me a bit of Rene Engstrom (creator of Anders Loves Maria) particularly in how Brumm depicts nudity and sexuality. The writing and characterization is also surprisingly potent for such a short zine, if a bit melancholy (it’s a zine about art school though, so that’s to be expected!)

Rudy Brumm can be found on Instagram at @funnygoofysilly!

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The Gremlin’s Library: i love you, and i’m sorry by Keith Cameron

December 12th, 2024

TW: The zine itself contains some pretty graphic second-person descriptions of self-harm, deliberate starvation, suicidal ideation and severe depression. I don’t go into it much but in the off chance you get a copy of the zine, it’s worth knowing ahead of time.

I genuinely don’t remember where I picked up this zine. I usually have some memory or another attached to zines I pick up, but this one doesn’t bring back anything – which makes it a fun little enigma. Although fun isn’t quite the right word. It’s a stark, typed little thing, and the moment I open it, I’m slammed with prose that’s almost poetic, lapsing in between a rhythmic kind of pattern and the breathlessness of a rambling monologue.

Not that that’s a bad thing. if ‘i love you and i’m sorry’ reminds me of anything in particular, it is vent poetry, but in a completely undistilled form. It’s someone’s inner struggle, including the voice that rips you apart when you’re at your lowest and finds every single flaw with the way you do things, the way you are, the way you exist. Neurotypical people may read that and go ‘huh?’ For most neurodivergents, especially those with severe depression and/or PTSD, the concept is probably familiar.

The most interesting thing for me about Cameron’s work is that he stresses, over and over again, how nothing bad has ‘technically’ happened to him. His reminiscences of high school are mostly about his anxiety and avoidance of others; his parents aren’t mentioned in any significant way . There’s no trauma lurking like a shark behind the lines, at least not showing itself — just the trauma on the page of wanting closeness and never quite being sure how to get a version of it he wants. As someone who primarily consumes queer work, where a lot of our trauma is externally imposed and/or relating to dysphoria, it’s a perspective I appreciate; it’s easy to think of a lot of mental illness as inherently traumagenic, when the experience of being mentally ill is in fact traumatic in and of itself.

I can’t say I agree with all of the conclusions Cameron comes to, certainly re: love and art, but I also don’t think this is the kind of zine presenting logical conclusions as arguments on their terms. Still, I think it’s worth a read, and I definitely appreciate the little breaks — the middle pages in particular made me chuckle, and show a lot of self-awareness towards other vulnerable readers. (Trigger warnings on zines aren’t as normalized as they should be, and like I said, I don’t actually remember when I acquired this – but I’ve been collecting zines for a long time.)

Unfortunately, a search for Keith Cameron doesn’t yield anyone who quite looks like the right person, but if you’re interested in acquiring a copy, you can email kmecameron@gmail.com and see if you get a response.

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Tag: Zine Review

Little Free Archive: Water-Kin by Mahaila Smith

The Gremlin’s Library: Secrets Inside Cabling by Calliope Neurotoxin

The Gremlin’s Library (Rerun Post): “press ctrl-alt-delete” by Vanessa Maki

The Gremlin’s Library: Back to School by Rudy Brumm

The Gremlin’s Library: i love you, and i’m sorry by Keith Cameron