Author: Heavy Feather

“Evil Was Real”: Matthew Kinlin & Nicholas Rombes Discuss His Novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Released just over a decade ago, the mystery of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing from Nicholas Rombes only deepens. In the mid 90s, a journalist tracks down and interviews a rare film librarian who once burned a stockpile of film cannisters and disappeared for many years. The head-twisting neo-noir follows Laing’s descriptions of these…
New Side A Haibun Postcard: Judson Evans

Pittsburgh, PA – Warhol Museum,Aug. 17, 1997 Dear Connoisseurs and Collectors— Surprised to discover Warhol had his very own Museum-mausoleum. That he came from a real place, thought maybe hewas a breech birth from a Campbell’s “Tomato Rice” soup can.Always hated the way rice grains looked bloody. I didn’t know he’dbeen shot again and again:…
Poetry Review: Sandra Fees Reads Laurel Benjamin’s Debut Collection Flowers on a Train

In her debut poetry collection, Flowers on a Train, Laurel Benjamin reminds us of what’s possible if we are willing to revisit broken relationships and allow something else to blossom in their place. As the collection’s title suggests, nature permeates these pages. While we might be tempted to assume these will be nature poems, they…
Fiction Review: Kevin McMahon Reads Hollay Ghadery’s Debut Novel The Unravelling of Ou

In her debut novel, Hollay Ghadery blends a refreshingly unique premise with a natural gift for voice, delivery, and cutting straight and deep, deftly exploring the roots of grief and pain, internalized shame, isolation, and self-disregard. In tracing these headwaters, she reveals how we make it all bearable, somehow. And more importantly, what the elusive…
Poetry Review: Scott Ferry Reads john compton’s Collection house as a cemetery

In john compton’s book house as a cemetery we find a feast of sound, of image, of dream-states that blur in and out of place and time. As with all of compton’s poetry, we are immediately in the ether, there are no strings holding the puppets, there are no intermediaries between the void and the…
New Poem for Flavor Town USA: “Abundance” by Caleb Hill

IA can of pumpkin squats besidethe Korean bowl given by my aunt, the poor stone potwhere my culinary brainwaves come to rest, adoptedfor concoctions like this morning’s. My favoritelong-handled teaspoon rushes through the roundsof unlidded ingredients: crumbled feta, pickled olives, peppers, fish,cinnamon and sesame, allspice and onions,split peas shoehorned into cornbread, mozzarella melted inwith mounds…
Original Haibun Postcard for Side A: Judson Evans

Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians19 South 22St., Philadelphia,Aug. 25, 1997 Dear Indivisible Duo, I offer you a peak into this carnival tent/cabinet of curiosities,skull by skull: #28: Protestant soldier, suicide by gunshot wound to heart (because of weariness of life) North Hungary #30: Painter, suicide by potassium cyanide (because grief after abandonment by…
New Fiction: “The Blue Refuge” by Mehr-Afarin Kohan

The yolk was orange and soft and it ran over the white, ruining the egg’s sun in the middle. The light was glaring outside the kitchen window, where I sat at the table facing Tehran’s dry ranges in the horizon. It was my first morning in the country, still jet-lagged. I was back for a…
Bad Survivalist: Two Poems by Simon Ravenscroft

Emergence / upon clifftop Ever emerging into further con-vergences of perforated selfhood,one alights occasionally on this orthat compelling instant, truth shimmeringin the open apparently … for a time,for a time … before scuttling away againinto the hills to hide beneath the trees.Reflecting back later, nothing isever so convincing as it wasthe first time, back when…