On the Mouth

zine review:

On the Mouth

Another pretty but oblique collection from the makers of ‘sudden stars.’ This zine is a collection of mini-writings coupled with collage, line drawings and clip art, each page a new flourish of idea, sometimes forcefully and sometimes deli­cately articulated. Both the authors’ tech­nique and my sentiments are summed up in a line from ‘Snow’: “just when the story becomes interesting, it stops.” As with the authors’ other work, I want to like this zine, but get hung up on it being a lovely but empty package. It’s as though they’ve made a checklist of zine stereotypes and ticked off the boxes: nostalgic ’70s clip-art predominantly of women, one sentence stories that indirectly address loneliness or desire, dense collage interspersed with one dramatic line-drawn image and a lot of negative space. All of these things can be OK in a zine, but they’ve got to be used with purpose or supporting some stronger underlying idea. Otherwise, they slide into cliché. If this is a mash-up riffing on every element of a particularly common current zine aesthetic, then so be it, but I keep wondering if they were trying to do more, and wondering what that ‘more’ was. (sarah pinder)

Perzine, Kevin Rossi & Liz Worth 2360 George, Windsor, ON, N8W 4M4