Zine, Izalixe Straightheart, 38 pgs, 5591 B St-Laurent, Levis, QC, G6V 3V6, [email protected], $1 (for distros) or trade
Don’t call it a comeback, Iza’s been here for years. In fact, Iza started this issue in 2005 and this is the deluxe, remastered version. The premise is simple but promising: Meetings is a series of stories, each detailing a story of how she came to meet someone who would go on to become a good friend. We all have these kinds of memories and Iza shares hers in a casual style. Meetings is casual in the sense that the zine is very hand made with an almost off-the-cuff flare for pasted in type, handwritten annotations, and at least once instance of political incorrectness that I’ll chalk up to English being her second official language. It’s as off-the-cuff as a zine that took nine years to make can be. The sentences flow as if they are being said aloud and you are just leaning in to get the scoop. There are stories involving pagers, VCRs, gnarly bars, and high school gym class.
I would say that while there is humourous self-deprecation and charm here, I had trouble connecting with these tales. I feel that I would need to know the author to get the full picture. Or maybe there’s some displacement in a zine that is already about memories, being exhumed after nine years. (Check out another review of an Iza zine, The Happy Loner, on page TK.) (Chris Landry)