Book Synopsis
In 1986, a 'zine mailed out of a Quebec broom closet announced, in its very title, exactly how bad it intended to be — and then spent the next twenty-one issues proving it was right. FEH! A Journal of Odious Poetry didn't hide its vulgarity behind a mask of literary seriousness. It made the vulgarity the whole pitch. As founding contributor and later editor Dr. Crabbe Rangoon puts it, the 'zine "transmogrified a vice into virtue, before celebrating its inherent vice once again, all the more" — and somehow, against every reasonable expectation, that shameless double-dare produced some of the strangest, funniest, and occasionally the most quietly profound small-press writing of its era.
This anthology gathers the best of it: the poems that prompted bookstore clerks in Manhattan, Baltimore, and Montreal shelve a stapled photocopy next to actual literary journals. The letters column that sometimes occupied a significant percentage of the magazine — because a magazine with no reputation left to protect lets its comments section run hot, uncensored, and genuinely hilarious. The cryptonyms and pseudonyms — Simeon Stylites, Morgana Malatesta, Doeroadx — behind which contributors said things they'd never have signed with their real names. Prose companion Meshuggah's conspiracy theories, heresies, and vacuous nonsense, promised right there in its own subtitle. Cartoons, reviews, editorials, and the odd unexpected gut-punch of sincerity, all cut-and-pasted by hand in the literal pre-desktop-publishing sense, before the internet ever thought to make this kind of thing obsolete.
This isn't nostalgia dressed up as scholarship. It's a document of an underground that mail-produced its own economy, its own audience, and its own standards of taste — standards that ran in exactly the opposite direction of everyone else's. Sexually explicit, scatological, blasphemous, and unapologetically amateurish in places: yes, all of that, on purpose, by design. But scattered through the odium — as Rangoon promises — are surprising nuggets of wisdom and insight, the kind that only turn up when a magazine has stopped worrying about being liked.
FEH! Because some things are worth being read for exactly the reasons polite literature tells you not to bother.