12 Poems

By CJ Reay

I don't really read a lot of poetry, and so can find it hard to judge on its own merits. I had high hopes for this zine upon opening it as the first page seemed nicely designed. A poem about getting old was surrounded by photos of the writer's grandparents in their youth (or at least people from that era). Unfortunately the rest of the poems don't follow the same pattern, and while they do combine images with words they are generally just the poem placed on top single images (sometimes repeated), that don't always seem to have a lot to do with the poem.

The poems themselves deal with consumerism, homelessness, poverty, travel, and modern society: the stuff zines of any sort deal with quite frequently. Two of them in particular stood out to me. The first (none of them are named) is about waking in an airport and seeing fearful people wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from swine flu. Airports are weird places, because they're all pretty much the same, and I liked the picture of the paranoid, scared people this poem painted, along with the images of escalators in the background.

The other poem I liked is quite short, and I'll just reprint it here:

I don't like long poems.
I have a short attention span.
Stop talking shit.
Finished.