Author: Heavy Feather

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…
“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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
“State of Decay”: A Georgia Poets’ Roundtable

Regionalisms abound in accounts of contemporary poetry, and the American South remains one of the most complex and productive of those literary regions. Yet, with the contemporary scene saturated with MFA and PhD degrees in creative writing, young poets often uproot and move cross-country to enroll in graduate programs. Add in the compounding factor that…
One More Number, six surreal stories by Craig Rodgers, reviewed by Alan ten-Hoeve

I first read Craig Rodgers’ stuff last spring when Death of Print resurrected his 2019 novel, The Ghost of Mile 43, from the ashes of Soft Cartel. The hopelessness and misanthropy of that book acted like a counter pressure to the pandemic malaise that had me wanting to sleep the rest of my days away.…
“Escape from Freedom”: Vincent James Perrone Reviews Pilot, a debut collection of poetry by Danika Stegeman LeMay

“In the name of ‘freedom’ life loses all structure; it is composed of many little pieces, each separate from the other and lacking any sense as a whole. The individual is left alone with these pieces like a child with a puzzle”—Erich Fromm Body and Machine The text begins at the body—the B-o-d-i-e-s—the individual you…