GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker, 5/15/2025:
Amora Remero’s eating toothpaste #1 is a raw, unfiltered slice of lived experience — equal parts visual poetry and urgent prose, bound together in a homemade zine that feels like it came straight from a bedroom floor covered in scraps, ink, and catharsis.
Printed (most likely) on an inkjet at home, the lo-fi production is exactly what gives it its power. This is not polished. It doesn’t pretend. It leans into the mess, the overwhelming textures of Amora’s inner life, and the ink that sometimes smears or runs too heavy. It’s personal, vulnerable, and more than anything, honest.
The collages are frenetic — layers of cut-and-paste fragments, hand-scrawled thoughts, dark symbols, and photos that seem to fray at the edges. The visual chaos works like a second voice: one that doesn’t wait for permission. Each page feels like it could have been torn from a diary too painful to keep whole.
The writing dives into the hard stuff: the paralyzing fear of existing as a girl on public transportation, the heaviness of being medicated just to cope, the shadow of suicidal thoughts, the sharp and shifting intensity of feeling everything too much. These aren’t topics neatly resolved. They are held up like bruises, real and unhealed, offered to the reader without apology.
But there’s something else here too — something resilient. Amid the darkness, eathing toothpaste #1 pulses with the underlying belief that art is meaning. That the act of making — even if it’s a zine held together with glue stick and staples — is itself survival.
For anyone who’s ever felt swallowed by the noise of their own thoughts and found relief in the act of putting something on paper, this zine hits deep. It’s uncomfortable in all the right ways.
If eathing toothpaste #1 crosses your path at a zine fest, distro, or a folded stack at a punk show merch table — grab it. It’s a beautiful scream.
Media: Zine.
