Zine, clapboardhouse.ca
Picking this up I was instantly excited, like I had found a letter in an attic. Maybe it’s the thin newsprint that smells old and good. Also the small, neatly typed words that cling to the pages, and the ghostly vellum encasing the whole thing. Inside this quarter-size zine are 12 vignettes about various strangers: boys seen on trains and buses, through windows, or stocking store shelves. They are not quite poems but the prose is lyrical. The writing is simple and unpretentious.
What I found delightful about this zine is how the author describes feeting encounters without taking a “what might have been” angle. They are not “missed connections,” a trend fueled by the delusion that there must be something more to an exchange of smiles, that the feeting frisson between strangers always has to be thwarted true love. Rather, a passage about observing a friend-of-friends ends with this: “By now I would have broken/ the ice. /But why bother?” She is just cataloguing her lovely strangers. To this end, the closing sentence in “Everywhere Boy” seems more philosophical than wistful: “If we still have not spoken by the time you’ve read this/then what was it all for?” (Danielle Patrick)