Author: Heavy Feather

On The Year of the Monster with Tara Stillions Whitehead: An Interview by Shannon Wolf

I sometimes wonder how one person can do so much. At any one time, when I speak to Tara Stillions Whitehead, she is in departmental meetings, corralling children, squeezing in writing time, and still somehow finds the time to be a friend to all in the literary community. It is unsurprising to me that Whitehead—someone…
O, a poetry collection by Niki Tulk, reviewed by Tara Walker

When you read Niki Tulk’s O, you are enclosing yourself within a rich tapestry of glistening threads: motherhood, daughterhood, grief, falling, ruthless love and cruelty, the moon, the ocean, transformation and becoming and leaving and being born. A lesser writer might struggle to blend these elements. A book that contains phone calls with prosecutors, the…
Haunted Passages: “Possession” by Lauren Brazeal Garza

Mother, suddenly they were everywhere—dozens of chittering advertisements for an “EVP consultant.” In scrutiny of all who passed, their art-deco lettering burst fiercely from those printed slime-green flames, offset by supersonic purple. The text beckoned, FLAMORA: witness of all. Resolutions through recording. Beneath this lurked a local phone number. I put off calling her for…
Where Are the Snows, a poetry collection by Kathleen Rooney, reviewed by Esa Grigsby

As the cover suggests, these poems are a winding wry road towards the hell Rooney, almost delightfully, explains is Earth, where the speed bumps are humor, the billboards politics, and the golf-ball sized hail is spirituality. The landscape speeding, yet somehow also wallowing, by is peppered with memories, humor, philosophy, and good ole nihilism: “Sometimes…
Side A Poem: “Honestly” by Tony Gloeggler

Honestly To pass the hours I spendby her bedside, I ask moma lot of questions, some dumbto make her laugh about fartson elevators, falls in hotel halls,her famous poor eyesight,walking into wrong bathrooms,setting her beehive hair-doon fire with her lit cigarette.Anything to take her mindoff her pain, a breathfrom boredom. Some questionsuncover things I never…
The Not Yet Fallen World, new and selected poems by Stephen Dunn, reviewed by Jeanne Griggs

The Not Yet Fallen World: New and Selected Poems, by Stephen Dunn, offers poems from his nineteen volumes of poetry and adds nine new poems; there’s a last section of poems written right before his death on June 24, 2021. Dunn’s poems are famous for his observations of the marvelous in the ordinary, and for…
New Story for Side A: “Dark Rhymes” by Peter Gordon

Dark Rhymes They’re waiting for him in a Greek diner on 9th Avenue, hanging all the way in the back, in the last booth before the bathrooms. None of them look up as he approaches. He might as well be a ghost. Without lowering his paper Paul says, “Have a seat, Joel.” There’s no room…
“All Your Base Are Belong to Us”: Jacob Collins-Wilson on Roger Reeves’ second poetry collection Best Barbarian

Best Barbarian is Roger Reeves’ second book of poetry and it is a beast, as it wants to be. It pulls inspiration from fables, history, poetry, and literature (past and more present). In its core, Best Barbarian seeks to not just be a part of the literary canon, but to rewrite the canon, to create…
Shannon Nakai Reviews Equestrian Monuments, a poetry collection by Luis Chaves

Eleven years after the publication of Monumentos Ecuestres (Editorial Germinal, 2011) by Luis Chaves, one of Costa Rica’s most celebrated poets, follows its first translation into English by After Hours Editions. In the introductory note, translators Julia Guez & Samantha Zighelboim discuss the intricate negotiations of language in Chaves’ playful, intuitive, linguistically acrobatic poems. Rife…