I wouldn’t exactly say that reading issue five of Womperjaw was a good time, but I get the feeling that’s exactly the vibe the author was trying to cultivate. This collection of poems written “for the bystanders… the witnesses to the fuck-ups fucking up and maybe feeling vaguely guilty about having their own shit together” strikes a chord somewhere between Hubert Selby Jr. and Ian MacKaye, all drugs and pity shot through a straightedge-ish lens. The first half of the zine features typerwitten poems — with slashes replacing all of the apostrophes, a stylistic nod to Selby, perhaps — and the second half is a stream-of-consciousness prose piece transporting us to a drug dealer’s apartment that staggers along from one ellipses’d fragment to the next against a Minor Threat soundtrack. All of it, the prose, the poems, capture a sort of druggy suburban bleakness that will leave you itching to escape from the pages. “Betray” (the prose piece) is especially uncomfortable, ricocheting you straight into an anxious realm, but many of the poems have a nostalgia about them that is more bittersweet. It may have not been a good time, but it still made for a good zine.