The latest issue of Broken Pencil: The Magazine of Zine Culture and the Independent Arts (Summer 2020) contains reviews of three Diode books: Julia Cohen's GOOD TIMING & GERTRUDE STEIN: Inside Snoopy's Snout Maggots Feast Upon My Blood (2020), Dorothy Chan's Revenge of the Asian Woman (2019), & Simone Person's Smoke Girl (2019). Thank you so much, Megan Clark, Jacqueline Valencia, and the editors of Broken Pencil for your consideration!
We love the incisive and innovative flair Broken Pencil brings to each issue and are so thrilled to be included in issue 88, which features excellent contributions such as "Zines in Plague Time" and Ras Cutlass' essay "Ancestral Tech & the Future of the Black Body."
"This work is about memory as a thin membrane to reality placed upon a setting of language formation. It is a unique and difficult construct for a poet. Cohen is adept at taking on the task."
— from Jacqueline Valencia's review of Julia Cohen's Good Timing & Gertrude Stein: Inside Snoopy's Snout Maggots Feast Upon My Blood
She is sexy, tender, and always honest, writing in one breath: "I wonder how food and love go hand in hand," and another, "feed me, sprinkle me — scoop up that whipped cream." Revenge of the Asian Woman is a bawdy, sexy, and deliciously sensual portrait of a woman not just taking back her power but feasting on it.
— from Megan Clark's review of Dorothy Chan's Revenge of the Asian Woman.
Utilizing many forms, such as erasure, prose poetry, free verse, and even an altered version of Alan Ginsberg's methods, there is no hesitation in Person's words for they are razor sharp in their assessments, "Didn't you notice he was a dog? Look back. Find his feet curved to claws. The bark in his throat."
What grabbed me most about this chapbook is that Person is fully within the body and outside of it, dealing, deciphering, and appreciating it in its Blackness versus the possible and actual cruelty in its violation.
This collection is emboldened by the stark jacket design, a matchstick glowing in a rainbow of fire against a dark black background. It calls out, much like Person's work inside of it, to listen to what has been done, because there is an intensity within that should not be ghosted.
—from Jacqueline Valencia's review of Simone Person's Smoke Girl
