Author: Heavy Feather
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Flavor Town USA: Excerpts from ROSE MASK, service conversations by Jared Joseph
Rose Mask is a series of transcriptions of conversations between myself and the customers I served at a cocktail lounge and restaurant in Santa Cruz, CA, during 3 months of masked service due to the pandemic. The work is further framed as an impossible-to-stage work of theater, one that unfortunately plays itself out constantly in…
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From “devours itself”: a mixed media collaboration for The Future by Alexandra Mattraw & Adam Thorman
*Ed.’s Note: click on image to view larger size. The Image Devours Itself 1 Adam Thorman If only my mouth it is that I will turn, seaward. Glow the apple in your phone we stand cliffside. Click pictures : Blue lace borders what isn’t. Cyclone, chain, center beach caving. Unseen I in the dream you…
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Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Romana Iorga
Fairy Tale After James Schuyler I heard a rooster crow three times this morning.What does it mean, whom have I betrayed?Each day I walk toward something with a shore,or else, with a clearing. Humans use treesto surround their emptiness, their viscous needfor each other. I think I may still be a human.In the forest, no…
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Deborah Bacharach on The Strategic Poet, a craft book edited by Diane Lockward
You can learn poetic craft. That’s my biggest take-away from Diane Lockward’s new book, The Strategic Poet. This shouldn’t be such a big reveal, but I made it through an entire Master’s in Creative Writing without an in-depth and systematic approach to craft. I’ve been cobbling one together ever since, including spending time with Lockward’s…
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“The Ratio of Books to Songs </= People to Cake": A Playlist by David James Keaton
Much like “Dave,” the protagonist in my new novel She Was Found in a Guitar Case, many people think I have terrible taste in music. And this is probably true. But an outsider (meaning someone without a reasonable grudge who just wants to hurt me by turning off my mixtapes mid-song) might also consider my…
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Side A: “OUR SPERM COUNT IS DOWN!,” a collaborative work by Vi Khi Nao & Jessica Alexander
OUR SPERM COUNT IS DOWN! We watched a magic-heist last night. It was like J.K. Rowling wrote an episode of Law & Order & David Mamet directed it. We thought the magicians were one step ahead of the law but the law was the greatest magician of all. We agreed the female lead was too pretty…
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“O Pen the State/open the say/ate the stated,” a Side A Poem by Tony Mancus
O Pen the State/open the say/ate the stated We are always one link from disaster blinking the clouds top the mountains like thought bubbles from the earth with a silhouette of a person crossing above the road some wearing a reality backdrop/terminus and beginning/eventually the body forgets how to swallow the mirror in every eye shaving reality drops behind its work zone sign blinking cream true what roots we…
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Bad Survivalist: “DON’T CHIDE THE HOOTCH” & other RIP VW erasure/collages by Nance Van Winckel
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nance Van Winckel’s ninth poetry collection, The Many Beds of Martha Washington, is just out with the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series/Lynx House Press. She’s also published a book of visual poems with Pleiades Press (2016) and five books of fiction, most recently Ever Yrs, a novel in the form…
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Gentefication, a debut collection of poetry by Antonio de Jesús López, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
In April 2021, a recently elected city councilman of East Palo Alto championed for local clinics to accommodate a vulnerable, often overlooked community that reaped high COVID rates and less access to vaccines, a problem which he linked to barriers of race and language: “Immigrants and folks of color often by lack of English fluency…
Heavy Feather Review 