Author: Heavy Feather

“Palmerland: BNA’s Ellis Island,” a short comic from The Future by Angus Woodward

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Angus Woodward was raised by southerners in the Midwest and moved to Louisiana half a lifetime ago. His books of fiction are Down at the End of the River, Americanisation, and Oily. His comics have appeared recently in Hobart, Slag Glass City, Shenandoah, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere. “Palmerland: BNA’s…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “In the Afterlife Your Landlord Is a Witch” by Maggie Nye

She does not wear a pointed hat around the property, except in winter. And the hat is not so dramatically pointed as to be ridiculous. The underside of the brim is lined with white rabbit fur. It looks warm and stylish. Your landwitch also keeps a huge hound-sized rabbit for a pet. There are many…
Haunted Passages: “The Lamp,” a flash fiction by Scott Daughtridge DeMer

Echo’s kids asked what secrets the lamp told. She didn’t answer, just stared at the bulb, lit to full brightness. She didn’t blink. Her husband asked what was wrong, asked if she planned to go back to work. Her friends came and tried to pull her away, but she shrugged them off and stayed in…
“Sometimes You Wanna Go Where Nobody Knows Anybody’s Name”: Dustin Holland on Steve Aylett’s Hyperthick #1

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Picking up a piece of Steve Aylett’s work for the first time is always a confounding experience. His prose and his comics are often inscrutable blends of genres and mediums that wear their influences proudly on their sleeves while being unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered. The…
I Failed to Swoon, a poetry collection by Nadia de Vries, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou

Nadia de Vries’ I Failed to Swoon is a slim collection of poems that are by turns playful, brutal, and aloof. The poems in this collection are short—some of them no longer than Tweets. Much of the language invokes tropes of internet speech: droll one-liners, self-assured aphorisms, jaded indifference, and cliché. de Vries unsettles the…
Three Collaborative Poems by Lauren Hilger & Dionissios Kollias for Flavor Town USA

Party Favors I pretend it’s the fast and vicious future with a slow sax and 1991 looming overblack sheer tights, friendly kisses on both cheeks. I close my eyes to their emeralds and rubies and panic, capture and share,hand it over to others. I give it away too soon,before it becomes me. Part of my…
La Serenissima, a poetry collection by Wallace Barker, reviewed by Donald Ryan

Wallace Barker’s La Serenissima from Gob Pile Press. 19 chapters. 19 vacations. Each poem a single sentence, less than a page, recounting moments in instances. Like photographs in a family album, the poems are souvenirs. You may not know the people in the picture or what’s taking place in the background, but within each frame…
Bad Survivalist: “What Makes You Feral,” a short story by Julie Wernersbach

PIPE BURST. COME EARLY. She rushed. What did she expect? A pipe shattering in mid-air, hard water bursting from the metal and plastic ceiling in frozen shards, an icy scream hovering above the Junior Prom dresses. But when the woman got to work, the emergency was only water on the floor, all the way to…
Condemned to Cymru, a novel by M.J. Nicholls, reviewed by Eric Williams

M.J. Nicholls’ new novel Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. It even affects the Rabelaisian flourish of an artificial structure—the story is mostly presented as one pathetic misanthrope’s alphabetized travelogue (of sorts) of Wales, written for a sinister Icelandic thinktank…