Quitter / Ten

Quitter / Ten
52 pages, mini
$6 + postage

I really loved this. I was pretty sure I'd read an earlier issue, but when looked it up I couldn't find anything. As I was eking out words that might adequately praise this work, I got distracted looking over a book of excerpts from previous issues that had come in the same package. On the back cover were the requisite blurbs. One struck me as being precisely what I would say. Then I realized I had written it for a review in an issue of Zine World.

"The subject matter is intimate and stark. With precision wordsmithing, Trace ventures into parts of the emotional landscape we normally avoid, and engages us by tapping the common well of humanity with an unflinching examination of his personal experience. Inspirational."

All of the above still holds true, though this issue is perhaps a little less stark. Lovely art inserted in unexpected places. Some of the typeface is art as well. It goes forward and backward in time to draw together bits of the writer's life and weave them into an unlikely something. The center point being a house that isn't there anymore. A memory of a house that is a depository for family nestolgia. A house that is now just part of a corn field.

The continual and eventual wiping away of the past is juxtaposed against the unfolding the now in the form of his wife and baby girls. Thoughts of mortality are the middle ground between his past and future. Stories of birds told to his older girl are the common thread that stitch it all together.

I suspect I would be enthralled by anything this guy wrote.


Order
http://pioneerspress.com/products/quitter-10

Contact
Trace Ramsey, 213 N Briggs Ave, Durham NC 27703
traceramsery@gmail.com



review by Jack Cheiky
This zine is being donated to the Cleveland Zine Library after review.