Author: Heavy Feather

Terri Drake: Five Poems

Legend She offered her bodyas the world’s terrain.The smooth skin and the scars. She closed the curtainsand put a finger to her lips. She baked breadso we wouldn’t have to live on air. She made of the earth a giftand placed it at our feet. She sent out the dogs as sentinels.They came home to…
“The Woman of His Dreams,” a flash fiction by Kimm Brockett Stammen for Side A

The Woman of His Dreams He’ll meet her when he’s sleeping in the right bed. He’s planned out what to do: he will grab her. Gently, carefully, of course. He is not exactly sure how hard one has to grab to catch hold of a dream. But he will grab, nonetheless, and hold on, and…
“Maternal Monsters”: E.B. Schnepp Reviews Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross

Michelle Ross’ second collection, Shapeshifting, can only be described as a procession of horrifying transformations. More specifically, this is a series of horrifying female transformations that reveal with startling clarity the lack of agency that comes from existing in a feminine body, particularly when it comes to childbearing and its corresponding vulnerabilities. This transformation is demonstrated…
“A Disquieting Truth in Broken Hearts”: Robert Crooke Reviews Proof of Me & Other Stories by Erica Plouffe Lazure

In subtly connected tales of life in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, Erica Plouffe Lazure writes as if sharing yarns about her own extended family. She knows her people that well. And she has Eudora Welty’s sense of the way people and places determine each other’s fate. Thus, a naturalist’s field excursion in “Spawning…
“There Is No Answer to the Simplicity of Weather,” a collaborative poem by Leigh Chadwick & Mitchell Nobis

My dreams are nothing but a wall of owls. I wake up all eyes and twisted thumbs. The birds are back in pre-dawn spring. I’m stuck in an alarm clock of sweetness and tweets as the river pushes heavy with dead winter and trash. Benches are free unless you’re poor. I think about church, but…
Six Poems by A. Martine

i have my own problems i stop telling everyone i’m a good listener people profess they miss mebefore i clock the sentiment i askwhat did you losewhat is wrongwhat is it from me that you need i’m sorrygoodwill has again done a number on mei don’t want to take or be taken care ofi want…
What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…
Book Review: Shannon Wolf on Bud Smith’s novel Teenager

Collectively, we’ve been obsessed with the Bonnie and Clyde narrative for decades. In the 1950s, we were a nation held captive by the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in Nebraska and Wyoming. Those murders inspired the Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers in 1994. So,…
A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, stories by Steve Gergley, reviewed by Kassie Bohannon

In A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, Steve Gergley provides several perspectives on the titular experience, including everything from epic battles between man and God in the desert to surreal in-between moments where a couple fights to revive passion while also fighting for their eternal souls. There are hilarious moments with unprofessional dentists, sorrowful…