Peops: Portraits and Stories of People by Fly
Soft Skull Shortwave: 2003
This is a wholesome, satisfying, inspired book – one woman's tribute to some of the amazing people she has met during her lifetime.
Each page has a head-and-shoulders pencilled portrait (some b&w, some in colour) bobbing in a vegan soup of words which seem to come straight out of the place and time of the sitting (or standing or wriggling around). The characters who inhabit each page are a motley bunch of activists, musicians, fringe-dwellers, anti-capitalists and free-thinkers. Peops documents a snippet of their achievements, joys or sorrows in their own words with a little blurb from Fly about how she met and admires them.
Peops makes you feel like you are being personally introduced by Fly to her extended friends and whanau and trusted with some of their most intimate thoughts, as each face speaks out of the page to you. There is also a good dose of alternative celebrities – Sue Coe, Neil Gaiman, Trina Robbins, Wendy-O-Matik, Michelle Tea, Mary Harris, Seth Tobocman, Citizen Fish...
Peops animates and unwinds the gut feelings of friendship and the struggle for meaningful existence in the capitalist dystopia of the U.S., all the while conveying the comedy and spirit of the people involved. Michelle Tea writes of Fly: “She is both a poison reality injection and its gleeful antidote”.
TG 20/04/2005