Author: Heavy Feather

Side A Poem: “Content” by Heikki Huotari

Content 1. should a safe be dropped then so should a piano and to music and to money both should open I say privatize the positive and socialize the negative and call it content here a template there a template everywhere a template in the same way that I hope for your sake that your…
“Gatsby Goes Public”: A Critical Essay by Robert Crooke about America’s All-Time Favorite Novel

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s highly-praised and ultimately best-selling novel entered the “public domain” as of January 1, 2021, after 95 years of copyright protection. What happened to Fitzgerald and his subtle, gossamer web of a story during that century is as interesting as the novel itself, given how perfectly the real-life tale confirms…
Side A Poetry: “Sousveillance, or: The Springfield Sarah Jessica Parker Disaster” by Ben Tripp

Sousveillance, or: The Springfield Sarah Jessica Parker Disaster when money became speech Dyads parafin the duration non-machinable flesh mic at jowl non-camouflage couldn’t alter or predict cephalopod high-arousal unheroic teller city with lake interior The false antique no and subject theory I have failed the task of radiation cryptographic An air freshener with the…
“Signature Parallax”: Dustin Cole Reviews Tom Will’s You, the Viewer at Home, Moon

In Tom Will’s You, the Viewer at Home, Moon a totaled car looks like a praying mantis, love-making sounds like a string of pearls dragged down the road, and someone breathes Diesel light. It is a book of textual oddities, effortless in its fluctuation of consciousness and shifting points of view. Associations proliferate, questions deepen.…
“Haunting and Hunger”: K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want Reviewed by E.B. Schnepp

Highlighting the crossroads of desire at once familial and physical, K-Ming Chang’s lyrical and deliciously experimental short story collection, Gods of Want, evokes a haunting sort of hunger. This collection is riddled with ghosts; moving through the stories we are confronted first with the literal ghosts of the lost and departed and then increasingly by…
The Great Indoorsman, essays by Andrew Farkas, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

There are too few champions of the indoors. The word itself has been sullied by incels and agoraphobes—malcontents and the discontented—connoting loneliness and isolation, despite its unassuming etymology. The indoors have languished in the cultural backwaters of nonfiction, pushed aside for the literally (literarily?) greener pastures of the travelogue, the naturalistic essay, and texts concerning…
Stories from the Attic, previously unpublished work by William Gay, reviewed by Dawn Major

After William Gay’s passing in 2012 a mountain of unpublished work was discovered and Team Gay—a group of artists, authors, professors, scholars, basically uber fans— was formed. I came into the picture while writing my master thesis in 2016 and I reached out to the archive for more in-depth information on Gay’s writing. After I…
“Crabgrass,” a new short story by Michael Cole for Haunted Passages

Diane woke calling out for someone, startled, in the same way that she would occasionally wake with a laugh, or even crying, embarrassed at the sharp blow of emotion dealt from a dream that was already fading. “Hello?” she said, still half asleep, chasing after a specter that had run a cold finger down her…
Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

It’s sometimes disturbing to think about the ways in which traditions evolve. Nothing, after all, starts out as a tradition. The word, by definition, carries in it the implicit understanding that an idea or act has happened a number of times, across a lengthy period, with some level of sustained intentionality. Human civilization functions around,…