I came home with a foreigner Saturday night

I came home with a foreigner Saturday night

by Jeremy Dixon / Hazard Press

A6, eight pages, Limted edition of 100, colour print, hand stitched. 

£4 (free p&p)

I am a huge fan of found art and found writing. One of my favourite zines of the early 2000's was Found magazine, I included a monthly found poetry column in The Fix (now no more, but at the time the UK's first stand up comedy magazine), and my live interactive show Choose Your Own Documentary centres around four pages of a diary found between the pages of a second hand book. So, even before opening this up, I knew I was going to like it. 

I came home with a foreigner Saturday night reproduces a photographic portrait of a man taken sometime around 1910-1919, and a handwritten entry scrawled on the back. Because its tricky to decipher the handwriting, the text has also been translated into type, and in the process has become poetry. 

The poem is pregnant with desire, promise and hope. And like all found writing is riddled with questions - the who, what, where - but also 'what happened next?'. It is this fragment of time lost that gives this little book its power. 

To buy a copy, or to check out more of Jeremy's work visit: www.hazardpress.co.uk

Review by Nathan Penlington

Unbridled Enthusiasm - Vol 1, No 3

Unbridled Enthusiasm - Vol 1, No 3. Summer 2017. 

by Matt Gholson

14cm x 21.5cm, 28 b&w pages.

Single issues $3 or trades

Unbridled Enthusiasm is a really engaging perzine - it draws you effortlessly into someone else's town, interests, and relationships. Like many of the best zines, Matt is someone who is making a zine simply because he wants to make a zine, and draws upon his life to fill it.

I loved the interview with Matt's wife about her passion for Post Crossing - the postcard sending website; the Mysterious Battery and the Spoon Thief are like the best stories in a local newspaper from a place isn't your own town; Stories From My Dentist might encourage you to get your teeth checked more regularly, if only for the storytelling; Matt's honesty about swimming and his interest in inkjet printers is both sweet and endearing; and the photography project that revisits the same small town locations, with a better camera, 13 years later is right up my street (it reminds me of some of the projects the French writer George Perec carried out). 

If you have an interest in the technical aspects of photography there is something extra here for you too - both in the discussion about using film in 2017, and the details of the cameras used for the photos that fill the zine. Unbridled Enthusiasm is nicely put together, and the b&w photos really pop out of the page. I look forward to reading future issues.

Contact Matt mattgholson (at) gmail [dot] com to buy a copy or to arrange a trade. Matt runs a great website that catalogues zine trades he's made - it's that spirit in the zine world that I'm utterly a fan of. 

Check out photozinetrader.com for more info. 


Review by Nathan Penlington

025.431

By Ella Dawson, Zoe Forster, Caitlin Verney, and Ruth Collingwood

This is a group zine featuring a pretty wide variety of content. The first piece is half photos and half text and is about interesting/important graveyards that Dawson has been to. It's pretty cool, but the photos suffer from being reproduced by photocopier and having text pasted over them. Graveyards are rad!

The next piece is on big cats, and features a number of drawings of roaring cats, as well as a review/plot summary of a movie about one of those weird celebrity big cat performance people from the USA. Animal performances always make me kind of sad.

The longest text piece was a story about the trials and tribulations a woman went through in order to get a pet cat. It made me miss the cat I had back when my family lived in Canada. Biscuit, you were awesome.

There's also some found objects, collages, and other stuff. The whole thing seems sort of like a collection of found objects, and the library numbering of its subjects makes it seem like you're just wandering around a library reference section reading things at almost-random.

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)