Author: Heavy Feather

Six Poems by A. Martine

i have my own problems i stop telling everyone i’m a good listener people profess they miss mebefore i clock the sentiment i askwhat did you losewhat is wrongwhat is it from me that you need i’m sorrygoodwill has again done a number on mei don’t want to take or be taken care ofi want…
What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…
Book Review: Shannon Wolf on Bud Smith’s novel Teenager

Collectively, we’ve been obsessed with the Bonnie and Clyde narrative for decades. In the 1950s, we were a nation held captive by the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in Nebraska and Wyoming. Those murders inspired the Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers in 1994. So,…
A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, stories by Steve Gergley, reviewed by Kassie Bohannon

In A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, Steve Gergley provides several perspectives on the titular experience, including everything from epic battles between man and God in the desert to surreal in-between moments where a couple fights to revive passion while also fighting for their eternal souls. There are hilarious moments with unprofessional dentists, sorrowful…
Bad Survivalist: Three Poems by Ryan Clinesmith

Apocalypse I ——An apocalypse is an enzyme of separation, salt turned sugar, apples oxidizing, blue death, survival as the catalyst to enjoying sunsets, closing your eyes in a Mecca-crowd, a 42nd-St-New-Year’s-Eve crowd, closing your eyes only after looking around to see you are the crowd—— or it’s the time, a block before we got back…
The Year of the Horses, a memoir by Courtney Maum, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

For Courtney Maum, The Year of the Horses followed a period of intense internal struggle. A crisis of identity as her daughter turned two brought on a bout of depression and insomnia so significant, it caused her life—and marriage—to stall. She found herself at a crossroads and needed to take the right path—and being a…
“Bounty,” a Bad Survivalist Flash Fiction by Michele Finn Johnson

Marian’s halfway through her beginner Peloton class when she hears her husband, Luke, scream—What the hell? She slows her pedaling, listens for his lazy follow-up—Have you seen my socks? Did you drink all of the almond milk?—anything that means Marian doesn’t have to try and unclip herself from this mechanical beast. Snails? Are those snails? …
“The Mystery of Growing Up”: Robert Crooke Reviews When Me and God Were Little by Mads Nygaard

In this complex and personal novel, dedicated to his father, Mads Nygaard spins a web of mysteries around family secrets, religious obsession, and psychic unrest in a bleakly rugged Danish setting. It is Nordic fairy tale, social history, and Danish-Lutheran parable in equal parts. And a wondrous narrative featuring innocently cynical observations by a seven-year-old…
Music Is Over!, a novella by Ben Arzate, reviewed by Carl Fuerst

In 2013, I visited my brother in NYC, where he’d moved to pursue a career as a chef. I was a lifelong Midwesterner, and I imagined that the New York City subways wouldn’t be much different than the Red Line in Chicago. But this was fundamentally different. Before the pandemic began, nearly 5.5 million people…