Author: Heavy Feather

“The Field of What Is Unsaid”: A Review of Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast by Hannah Riffell

Longing is universal, and heartbreak is as common as the cold, as any scanning of the literary canon will reveal. What the poet Lisa Hiton recognizes, however, is that the landscapes on which these universal longings unfold are wonderfully impressionistic, to the point of being somewhat unknowable to anyone besides one’s self. In Afterfeast, Hiton’s…
“Polarities of Love”: A Review of The Pact, poems by Jennifer Militello, by Aline Soules

Love. How does it manifest itself? How many kinds are there? What are its extremes? With The Pact, Jennifer Militello explores love through imagery, language, and leaps. She never blinks and investigates the subject from its outer edges to its core. The book is framed by two poems: “Agape Feast” and “Ode to Love.” In…
Haunted Passages: Three Poems from Mineral Planet by James Pate

[In the garden of gray latex foliage] In the garden of gray latex foliage / mouths eating out and eating in / trembling hands in front of the broken, seeping masks / a static emerald memory lodged in the back, reflecting the partylights / the bulb at the end of the hall at the end…
“Electricity in this Dehydrated Landscape”: A Conversation with Vi Khi Nao by Mark Ari

Vi Khi Nao is a true original, a fabulously prolific artist whose curiosity, creative energy, and talent are apparently boundless. She writes poetry, fiction, drama, makes visual art, and juggles several developing manuscripts at once. She’s the sort of person who will learn a new language to collaborate on a book with someone from another…
Titus Chalk on Sterling Karat Gold, an award-winning experimental novel by Isabel Waidner

Isabel Waidner’s Goldsmith Prize-winning new novel is a cri de coeur from a Tory Britain battered by inequities. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 and prescribed brutal spending cuts as an antidote to the Financial Crisis, the country has become a callous place. But worse, since the 2016 Brexit referendum emboldened charlatans, liars,…
“Notes on Ann Lewinson’s Still Life with Meredith,” a book review by Peter Valente

Ann Lewinson’s novella Still Life with Meredith is fantastically perverse, erudite, essayistic, and precise as a laser as it navigates high and low cultures and literatures. With the passionate eye of a critic, the narrator flirts with Lacan and Derrida and with raw sexual language. The result is a novella that is funny, bizarre, unhinged,…
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…
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…
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…