Author: Heavy Feather
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Excerpt from SCARLET: Three Glitched Still Lives by Francesco Levato
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. SCARLET is a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life in lockdown. The titles of poems in…
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Little Eyes, a new novel by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
In its eyecatching green-and-white cover and deceptively simple title, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes offers a playful, incisive critique on what it means to follow a global trend in our increasingly connected, yet increasingly virtual culture. With the contemporary feel and multinarrative structure à la Tommy Orange or Marlon James, Schweblin invites us into workspaces, bedrooms,…
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“Repetition Is Magical”: Jesi Buell in Conversation with Candice Wuehle, author of FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed
Candice Wuehle’s most recent poetry collection FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed centers around the magical elements of our everyday lives. Through cosmology, tarot, and alchemy, Wuehle is able to explore the dualities we encounter and transform them from binaries into continuums. I spent some time digging deeper into the collection with the author. Wuehle is the…
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How He Loved the Bones, a new chapbook by poet Caitlin Scarano, reviewed by Jonathan Kelly
Caitlin Scarano’s latest chapbook How He Loved the Bones takes us on a journey of recovery as we traverse the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia—the locus of trauma both individual and collective. This work neither romanticizes nor condemns Appalachia; it situates the region within a broader mechanism of historical, patriarchal oppression while positing a…
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Side A Video Poem Collaboration by Penn Kemp & Gary Barwin: “The Female Line”
A note on the media: Gary Barwin created the video poem in collaboration with Canadian poet Penn Kemp. Kemp wrote the text but Barwin set it with music and visuals and they both performed it. The Female Line Some small part of us is held in our mother’s egg whenshe is in our grandmother’s womb, …
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“Distance and Memory,” a Side A Essay by Jason Zuzga
My grandmom Victoria (Tomaro) Stracquadanio born in Boiano, Italy, immigrant to Bound Brook, New Jersey, subsequently married John of Modica, Sicily. At the age of 21, I visited both towns. She, widowed, is suffering, at 99-years old, from vascular dementia at a nursing home near my mom’s home. My grandmom is now under the protocols…
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“Cloud-bellies Full of Virgin Birds”: Arturo Desimone Reviews Tension: Rupture, poetry by Cutter Streeby, paintings by Michael Haight
In the prologue to Tension : Rupture poet Cutter Streeby admits to the unpredicted challenges of collaboration between two artists who, while using different media, deal with strongly interrelated autobiographical leitmotifs of substance abuse, resulting in a requiem for the past. The Tension : Rupture of the title seems to refer, therefore, not only to…
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“Buoyant Also”: Liana Jahan Imam on Aisha Sasha John’s TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED
Aisha Sasha John’s most recent chapbook begins with a short page that might double as scrolling titles at the start of a horror film: “In the fall of 2018, I left Toronto for Vancouver—the city where I spent the bulk of my childhood and in whose suburbs my parents still live.” On a separate line:…
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Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach on Expendables, a poetry collection by Emma Villazón
In Emma Villazón’s own words, the title of her first collection Temporeras, or “migrant woman farm hands,” translated by Thomas Rothe as Expendables, compares the precarious labor of temporary female farm workers with the labor of female freelancers who “manufacture intellectual property” for companies whose “raw material is the word.” Although, for the speakers in…
Heavy Feather Review 