Trans⋅Plant Issue 3
Litzine/Artzine, Sal Diem and Cam Thorpe, 28 pgs, [email protected], $5
What mysterious hippy sorcery is this? I couldn’t find any bibliographic information in this zine so I copied the info I found in a BP review of a previous issue. Hopefully it’s still the same authors.
Trans Plant is a grab bag with drawings, poems, short musings, and photographs. The first essay, “Quesnel Laureate”, was my favourite. The author ruminates on a year I presume both authors spent in a place called Quesnel, which I gather is rather rural and involved working in agriculture. The authors are acutely aware of their outsider status, but don’t condescend or come off like hip urban queers slumming it in the boonies. The author talks about how they learned patience in Quesnel and reflected on city life wondering, “What promises do cities make, and break? Friends, community, anonymity, culture, progress, success?”
The five-page meditation on the nature of time and motion read like someone who gets really philosophical after they’ve smoked weed. The drawings are pretty professional-looking and wouldn’t be out of place on a T-shirt that would be for sale at Cry Wolf. The whole package is topped off with an Allen Ginsberg quote, which I found fitting because he embodies the mysticism, lyricism, and queerness that they are channeling here. But unlike Ginsberg, Trans Plant #3 leaves you feeling like you were airdropped in the middle of some stranger’s notebook and left to fend for yourself to understand; before you could get a foothold it was over. Somehow I get the feeling they like that, though. (Chris Landry)