Author: Heavy Feather

Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

“Dis–”, a prefix of negation, but also of an absence or removal, serves as the backdrop of Danny Rivera’s debut chapbook Ancestral Throat, an ecclesiastical elegy to his father and primal hymn to human origin. Discharged arias, dismantling chapters, discolored diaries, distended crowns, a dismissed choir: Rivera sings the pain of impermanence as the dying…
“If I Could Get By Without Sleep, I Would”: Tobias Carroll Discusses His New Novel, Ex-Members, with Ryan Sartor

When I think of the New York City literary scene, Tobias Carroll is right at the top of the list. He’s consistently championing writers, whether through his interviews at book launches around the city or as managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, a vital source for all things literary fiction and nonfiction. I also just…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “We Feed the Living” by Courtney LeBlanc

The week my father died I dugthrough the freezer and pantryin my parents’ house, pulled outthe ingredients to make my sister’sfavorite dessert. As I stirred and bakedI thought of my father, his body smallbut his hands swollen with edema.As the peanut butter cookies cooledon the counter, the sweet smell filledthe house, I stared out the…
In Memory of Memory, a novel by Maria Stepanova, reviewed by Sylwia Jurkowski

Organized chaos … or chaos that becomes slightly organized while the rest of it remains unbound. Surrealism’s allowance of the mind to wander into the illogical, to bathe in it, only to find the clear, unmistakable logic within. Let’s take the most basic definition of the word “memory” from Merriam-Webster, “the power or process of…
The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response: “No Leland, not you. You, and in…
“Dangerously Close”: Alyssa Quinn on Nina Shope’s Novel Asylum

Some books refuse to leave you unscathed; they draw you in, grip you tight, and when you get out—if you get out—you will remain forever marked. Nina Shope’s Asylum is such a book. An innovative work of historical fiction, Asylum tells the story of Louise Augustine Gleizes, a young woman diagnosed with hysteria by the…
“Creating a Possible Self”: Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold Reviewed by E.B. Schnepp

Beast at Every Threshold is not a collection that invites us in gently, holding our hand while we explore the world, but it is one that rewards us for taking the time to find our way in. The collection is a challenging read, equal parts devasting and delighting, defying all attempts at categorization; Wee reinvents…
Lovebirds, a flash fiction chapbook by Hananah Zaheer, reviewed by Jordan Terry

How many ways can a heart break? Hananah Zaheer aims to find out in her debut short story collection Lovebirds, which explores the complications of “love” and the hardship and chaos that comes with the raw emotion. In the collection, Zaheer’s female characters’ responses act as catalysts for radical change and Zaheer manages to wring…
Red Is My Heart, a collaborative novel by Antoine Laurain & Le Sonneur, reviewed by Jordan Nunes

To publicly share the details of life post-breakup would be an embarrassment for most people, but Red Is My Heart does not explore disturbing details about the relationship or the breakup. Instead we are taken into the mind of a man as he meanders through the trivial, often delirious, times of his suffering. This is…