Culled from decades of hunting and gathering in the underground, Ahlers has filled many binders to overflowing. Swan Song revisits the black and white photocopier esthetic of her genre-bending and influential book Temper, Temper and its sequel Fatal Distraction, finally completing this ground-breaking trilogy.

Poignant, evocative, and funny, Swan Song is everything I want from a zine and everything I want from a poetry collection. Like all of Ahlers’ work, it’s a masterful meditation on the collective girl consciousness. Ahlers is a once-in-a-lifetime artist whose zine work has informed so much of what we know about zines today.

-Safy-Hallan Farah

In Swan Song, Sonja Ahlers creates a blurring collage of imagery and words full of myth, pathos and dream. Carving away at the conscious, she shows us what is left behind: vulnerability, fear, confusion, and desire. Infused through it all is her honour and hope, joy and beauty, all with the fresh energy of the heady and visual hybrid form.

-Michelle Leon