CHASED BY CASTLES

"CHASED BY CASTLES" is our second submission by Axe (twitter/instagram). [Read "I TOLD YOU SO (idiot)" here]. It does some cool things with rhymes, and as someone who is pro-rhymes I loved that! Same as ITYSi, CHASED is a very visual and experiential collection. The genre and topics are different certainly, but the way they are written and presented is meant to evoke memory-based responses from a reader.  This is a zine of "illustrations and poems on the feeling of being chased by big ideas and big buildings, curses, spells, birds, herbs and nothing in particular. This zine was one of the most pleasant things to put together, and much of the writing was done specifically for this zine." There is always something familiar to me with poetry documents where nearly every paged has a scanned in image of an illustration accompanying it. Together the two chapbooks make a back-to-back journey of emotional visualized experiences. Whether it's positive or negative for you depends on where you're at, or what it makes you think of. What matters is that you're thinking and feeling all of it as you read them side by side. The first is meant to make you think about and experience the atmosphere and society of the spaces around you, but CHASED is about the physical buildings and constructed aspects of the world. You can feel like something's gunning for you from multiple directions (good or bad). Taking literally the ways that even just a change of scenery can deeply affect someones emotional state or place in life. A castle feels suffocating, couch-surfing feels like a pause on life and lost or wasted time, a staircase is a collection of unwitting crossed paths, a tunnel is a dark uncertain road in need of light, a city is full of terribly artifacts, a cabin in the woulds could be somewhere you wait for others, a kitchen must be cozy for conversation, and a door needs to be welcome to all arriving lifeforms. These are the places we are told of. These are the poems we have.

"a lesson in careless, a blessing dressed in leather worn a warning sign for all weathers there’s a comfort in microcosms in ready answers there’s money in comforts a plot of land on past times, it’s past time we were others"