Author: Heavy Feather

“The Land of All Time”: William Lessard Interviews Clark Coolidge + Six Exclusive Poems

For six decades, Clark Coolidge has been presenting language awash in information, with jarring and frequently hilarious syntax. Although frequently associated the Language School and the New York School, his work reflects his life-long dedication to jazz drumming and an improvisational poetics that takes in the entire world. In the following interview, Coolidge talks about…
Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound, a novel by Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy, reviewed by Jace Brittain

It begins with a body. Like a lot of the books and movies of the detective noir genre, we know there is a woman’s body and not much else: Michael says, I hate that she’s dead. Daniel says, I know. Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds…
Shannon Wolf on The Other Ones, a novel by Dave Housley

In Dave Housley’s newest offering from Alan Squire Publishing, a multitude of characters reckon with complacency as The Other Ones: coworkers left behind after failing to play in the lottery and watching their undeserving colleagues win big. Moving from the very concrete—the doldrums of office politics—to the abstract, strange, and disturbing—the wandering spirit of a…
“girls against god,” an ekphrastic poem by sterling-elizabeth arcadia

after annihilation (2018) remember how you cheated on heavenstared that alligator-angel in its eye & shot it dead? how your vertebrae surged with joyshimmered against the skin of your spine. he left you between dark walls& corrupting light—heaven-sent heaven gone to be in the south. with the silent wateramong those crystal trees. & when your…
“Dad’s House,” a short story from The Future by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

I go to the café with my machine, but I’m followed by a smell. No one else around seems to be bothered by it, and though it’s intense, acrid, sour, like my dad’s dirty toothbrush (how could he have kissed our mother after shoving that thing in his mouth?), I make myself get used to…
Bed, a poetry collection by Elizabeth Metzger, reviewed by Ben Tripp

The fundamental operation of Elizabeth Metzger’s new short poetry collection Bed is a careful reduction: the mortar of her true life experience shines as a thing somewhat negated or at any rate sublimated and newly preserved as a partial element in this ripe synthesis, which seems to also subversively toy with the idea of poetic…
“Embodying Language”: Fani Avramopoulou on Desire and Damnation in Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door

Composed of hundreds of loosely arranged narrative fragments, Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door tells the story of Soviet immigrants haunted by a turbulent past. Moskovich takes traditions of Russian literature—namely crime fiction and a journey to hell—and spins them into a surreal world filled with violence, sex, and cryptic symbolism. The result is…
“Forsaken”: Gay Degani Interviews Jayne Martin

A stick of dynamite is about the size of a banana. It doesn’t necessarily look dangerous, but it carries with it a huge blast. This little book reminds me of TNT. I thumb open the The Daddy Chronicles and find the prologue is titled “Ode to the Lone Sperm” followed by this first sentence “Eager…
“Lurking,” a short story by Tam Nguyen

For P.A, C*, J, P, D, and friends The campus’ hallway remained silent since the university’s closure earlier this year. Education was halted after the coup took over. As soon as different parts of the country slowly turned into battlefields, faculties and students got together and constituted a union, partially to create a self-didactic community,…