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The setting gives DeForge plenty to work with: the mechanics of a fungus-based internet; samplings of new lunar artforms; interplanetary and intercellular voyages. And of course, there are the birds themselves, in all their grand and ridiculous plumage.
Reading these poems feels like running laps in the author’s head. The external world has fallen away and we’re along for a destructive ride through the stages of breakup.
In Bára Hladík’s cross-genre debut, the reader is invited to witness the physical and philosophical implications of the autoimmune disease of a nameless woman, specifically ankylosing spondylitis.
Writer, illustrator and designer Marie Blanchet collects 31 spooky, surreal stories set in haunted, uncanny, but somehow still commonplace offices. Snippets of bizarre larger worlds, where the weird and unearthly are taken for granted as everyday realities.
Yawn Temisev’s comic collection left me more with a feeling of intrigue than it did any truly spurring positive or negative reaction. Maybe that’s a good quality in and of itself.
Jon Claytor’s main conceit is to bleed his unfiltered self onto the page. He bounces between dark suicidal thoughts and folksy vignettes about cute critters he sees on the road, but the flow feels natural.
They prevent cars from bumping into garages and pipes. Temporary Services explains that these protective objects are necessary given the alley’s value as a low-key modern day agora.
Readers might expect to encounter more about the Walkman itself and all the great cassettes she devoured back in those days. Aside from a surprisingly accurate drawing of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, the zine morphs into a story about memory, sound, and even grief.
Queer Little Nightmares accomplishes what mainstream media has historically feared: placing queerness at the forefront to tell human stories of creatures that seek love, vengeance, autonomy, and the reclamation of their ugliest parts.
Ryan Downum’s chapbook is a weird and wonderful treatise. It resists full comprehension and manages to do so with both elegance and gruesomeness.
Westerns are populated with larger-than-life characters, but children are notoriously difficult to write convincingly. Kelly’s Chatter and his orphan companions are adult minds in small bodies, making grave enigmatic statements while stone-facedly witnessing the world’s cruelty.
While it’s poetic enough and creates a lush mood of grimy eroticism, leveraging Lardeux’s talent for capturing sensory detail, The Second Substance’s experimentalism wrestles with the musk of the overly familiar.