Author: Heavy Feather
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Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Beer Can Chicken Primer: Revised” by Avery Gregurich
never ask the scout leader about the troop’s beer can chicken recipe because you are not and were never a scout of any kind. he makes it better off duty anyway, down the hill in his driveway where the divorce camper is parked. all recipe-makers now implore you to get that charcoal hot, crucify that…
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The Celestial Bandit, a tribute anthology to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell
Some writers’ legends are so large that they are usually read about rather than read. The author’s work takes on such a large, imposing existence that intimidates us and forces us to learn about the work through the life that produced the words; Joyce, Proust, Kerouac, to name a few. Oftentimes the life behind the…
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Selected Poems by Michael Gottlieb, reviewed by Steven Fraccaro
Michael Gottlieb’s concerns are striking in their intensity—I was tempted to write his “poetic concerns,” but they are more than that, if one may say so. In commenting on his work, the author has enumerated his themes as language, the city, and the life poets face. This is accurate, as far as it goes. But…
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An Impossible Love, a novel by Christine Angot, reviewed by Titus Chalk
Christine Angot’s latest novel to appear in English, An Impossible Love, is an elusive read. Slippery to pin down in terms of its genre, the story also transforms in our hands after a pivotal reveal recontextualizes everything that comes before it. Not only the story’s content, but Angot’s aesthetic, too. Without wanting to give too…
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Side A Flash Fiction: “Causality” by Anita Goveas
Causality When my placid younger brother scalded himself on his sixth birthday, the first time he ever cried, my mother declared it was inevitable and cultivated a hobby of having accidents. She could no longer touch a newspaper or our dog-eared copy of 1001 Nights without a papercut that rendered her helpless and table legs…
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“Maggie Siebert’s Dead Kitten as the Persecution of Consciousness by Reality’s Imitation of Eternity”: Charlene Elsby’s Review of Bonding
“Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” is the final story in Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t leave you, because it elucidates something fundamental to the persistence of the terrible—a fundamental premise we know to be true, but which isn’t made explicit except by madmen and metaphysicians. Maggie…
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Sift, a new poetry collection by Christian Hawkey, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez
The cover for Christian Hawkey’s first collection of poetry, The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), features a stuffed, anthropomorphized duck standing on the edge of a bed and staring blankly at itself in a mirror. Tinged in an orange glow, the cover is quite uncanny, since we as viewers are led to see ourselves…
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“Ghost Town,” a Haunted Passages Short Story by Chris George
We stayed in the van while our mom gave the ghost tour. These nights scared my sisters. They didn’t believe in ghosts. One of them had told me once that they were staunch materialists. They were precocious, having an otherworldly knowledge of things they shouldn’t know. It was child’s play stoicism. But these nights they…
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The Employees, a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, reviewed by Titus Chalk
Powerful men like to send things into space. Perhaps the darkness between the stars is the proximity to godliness they seek. Perhaps they want simply to untether themselves from Earth and its trifling concerns like workers’ rights. There is something of both these ideas in Olga Ravn’s latest novel, published in Danish in 2018, before…
Heavy Feather Review 