Author: Heavy Feather

Fox Henry Frazier: Three Mermaid Poems from The Future

Silver-Eyed Lilínabalén and Adam of the Red Soil Shared the First Pull & Fall of Earthly Promise By land, I saw his core transformedin daily toil russet-smudged ordained mortal scorch iron stains & aches,known, he said, to man alone. We soaked in evening glow, orange orb dippingpast horizon. Lowering home. Night would rinse him clean,…
Dream of Me as Water, a poetry collection by David Ly, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko

There is a disorienting quality to Dream of Me as Water, David Ly’s sophomore poetry collection. The ethereality of water and blueness permeate Ly’s poems, which resist cohesive thematic groupings, although each section does have a sense of adding to what came before, as evident by their titles: “Dream,” “Dream of Me,” and “Dream of…
Haunted Passages: Five Poems by Howie Good

App-athetic (1) Strange how you arrive with no address in mind. Objects begin to misbehave, clocks to bend and stretch. And then a procession of pallbearers carrying empty coffins enters—creased, stained, stoop-shouldered. The century feels a lot longer than a hundred years. (2) Facebook announces a suicide prevention app. If the heart stops beating, it…
“Gonzo Dante”: Jesse Hilson on Garth Miró’s Novel The Vacation

Garth Miró’s novel The Vacation is rollicking, obscene fun with large veins of noxious social satire laced throughout. When a heroin-addicted, dissatisfied social climber joins a cruise in the Caribbean with his high-society European wife for a momentous time that could end in their divorce, or worse, they find themselves entering the corridors of an inescapable new…
Nympholepsy, a collaborative writing by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein & Lisa Marie Basile, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I hope the following statement will come across in the spirit in which it’s intended (i.e. not too pervy) but I have always had a soft spot for stories about female adolescence. Not necessarily the fun ones—though I did once read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in a single, delightful sitting—so much as the emotionally…
Erotic: New & Selected, a poetry collection by Alexis Rhone Fancher, reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Dangerous. Transgressive. In Erotic: New & Selected, Alexis Rhone Fancher brings together two previous collections, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen (2014) and Enter Here (2017), with new photos and poems all focused on sex. It’s not just a story of one couple, one betrayal, one ménage-a-trois. Erotic: New & Selected is a…
“The Possibility of America”: An Interview with Indran Amirthanayagam by John Wall Barger

Born in 1960 in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Indran Amirthanayagam moved to London, England, at eight, and Honolulu at fourteen (where he attended high school with Barack Obama, who was a year younger). He attended Haverford College and then Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In his years working for the U.S. Foreign Service,…
“Go for the Jugular”: James Braun Reviews Campfires of the Dead and the Living by Peter Christopher

Campfires of the Dead: If you know you know. Know the cult-like status this long-out-of-print book has achieved, with original copies running over a hundred bucks on Amazon—or otherwise elsewhere—as of this writing. Know too, maybe, these stories as written under the wing and teachings of Gordon Lish, with an all-in focus on the acoustics…
“Cowboy Koans”: Jesi Buell Reviews Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

When you see a pronghorn antelope from your car, high upnorth in Nevada, by the Walker River Rez, I don’t knowwhat to be, the antelope, the person seeing the antelope,the grass that the antelope is eating, the feeling the person getsfrom seeing the antelope, the feeling the antelope has whileeating the grass, so I try…