Author: Heavy Feather
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Boyfriend Perspective, a debut collection of poetry by Michael Chang, reviewed by Stephen Scott Whitaker
Queerness, in Michael Chang’s Boyfriend Perspective, expands infinitely outward and inward in this full-length collection by the non-binary poet. Chang not only navigates western culture dominated by norms inherited from the patriarchy, but also Chinese culture and its own restrictions with regards to gender and sexuality. And we are challenged by Chang’s poesy and content,…
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“The Stories We Tell to Keep Ourselves Alive”: Wendy Bourgeois Interviews Thea Prieto
Thea Prieto’s debut From the Caves, winner of the Red Hen Novella Award, contains an entire post-apocalyptic world that is both empty and claustrophobic. In the core days of a blazing summer, four people fight for survival with only each other and their storytelling to drive them forward. Resources are catastrophically limited; the world is…
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“The Reasonable Liminality of Silent Hill 2“: Chris Kelso in Conversation with YouTuber Jacob Geller
As an educator, I can confirm my controversial belief (and with some certainty) that video games are the nascent form of cultural expression in the 21st century. It might be time for us all to emerge from Plato’s cave and accept that some of the traditions we know and love are dead or quietly dying.…
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“Cordyceps,” a flash essay by Sher Ting
Did you know cordyceps colonizes the bodies of carpenter ants, chemically hypnotizing them to ascend to the highest point in the environment before releasing a mushroom cloud of spores? I have been told a hundred useless facts, with bread and a butter knife on the train to Oslo. The man next to me, knotted in…
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Bad Survivalist Poetry: “where the space ends” by Anthony Santulli
even maps know that point of view is a lifeless music—that the next sense to evolve will only create further desire to escape from experience at intermission, the utterance of terms we barely notice (these things happen in the cracks, their particular hiss) …
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From Vol. 9: “In My Dreams There’s No One in the Maternity Ward,” a poem by Tessa Livingstone
I keep having dreams they take her from mewhen I hadn’t finished. I wanted her more. I wander halls in search of nurses. Babies.Their open mouths. Their frantic chantings. Nothing stirs here—only the peahenwho roosts in tall open trees, scratches at leaf litter, preens brown plumage. A listless planet in orbit,gravitating in and out of…
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“Picking,” a collaborative short story by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross from Vol. 9
I’m picking lemons from the lemon tree beside the back porch of a man I met a week ago at a fundraiser for the local cat shelter. Cocktails and Cats. I was mostly there for the cocktails, Josh was mostly there for his ex-wife, Maggie. She’s one of the shelter’s directors. “She’s my best friend,”…
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From Vol. 9: “from The Self Is Being Thought,” poetry by Amie Zimmerman
III. presented with the frameworkof fevers, faith, moonlight and such other violencean obvious definition of self I amnot ready to acceptI, predictably, am violentin my plunge to sleep greedy the dried-up bird bath I steady refuseto clean out and fillthe mock orangethat either smells like grape Kool-Aidor jasmine tea depending on how soberyou think I…
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From Vol. 9: “birthday poem” by Patrick Kindig
today there are marigoldsblooming in the street& i mean this literally.there are marigolds risingfrom the seam betweenthe curb & the pavement,twelve of them, marigoldsappearing unexpectedlywhere no marigolds shouldbe. today there are marigoldsblooming in the street & iam a little bit older, a littlemore likely to diewithout warning. i am older& more likely to die withoutwarning…
Heavy Feather Review 