Author: Heavy Feather

“I Couldn’t Stop Looking,” a flash fiction by Lisa Korzeniowski for Haunted Passages

I am standing in the backyard in front of the shed. My brother is at the kitchen window, moths circling his screened-in face. “What do you see?” Seth says. “Come see for yourself,” I say. “No way. He told us not to go in there.” “He left the door open,” I say, digging my toes…
Haunted Passages: “Raynaud’s Berries,” a new short story by Tony Burgess

—for Carrie On our way to the emergency room, we realize it is the twelfth day in a row of peppering rain. Solid grey foam fills the ditches lining the field beside our route. Beyond and up the escarpment, who knows? Now on this road though, tires engage with surface in a ceaseless shushing and…
“Father Calls,” a Haunted Passages short fiction by Andrew Bertaina

Two weeks after my father dies in a freak accident, a dramatic fall while trimming fruit trees in his yard, he calls me in a dream. When the phone rings, I’m outside, watching a cloud of mosquitoes do a balletic dance around my shin. I’m drinking bourbon on the rocks, and the glass is sweating…
Connor Fisher: Two Poems for Haunted Passages

An Aphid Complex An aphid complex emerged frombeneath the burning barn. Horses were theprophets of agriculture. I threw a tractor overa phalanx of shells that, in their elation,carved elaborate, infinitesimal initialsinto the desolate arena of sand. My knife is in midair. I am jugglingthe brutal levees of a drowned city. The wellreflects an image of…
“The Sky Never Left the Sky”: Tiffany Troy Interviews Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary…
Two Poems for Haunted Passages by Annah Browning

On Reading the Unsolved Mysteries I no longer want to see the world. I want to hold a bouquet of aliens in my hand like violets and stare into their black eyes. I want to get dizzy falling in love with the probe. I want to be the compass that swings and swings, never resting anywhere. There is no grove I am setting my eyes toward, no monolith I believe. Stones stand under stars because that is…
Playlist for the Apocalypse, a new book of poems by Rita Dove, reviewed by Carolyn Oliver

Playlist for the Apocalypse is Rita Dove’s first book of new poems since 2009’s virtuoso Sonata Mulattica (her Collected Poems: 1974–2004, also from W. W. Norton & Company, appeared in 2016), and well worth the twelve-year wait. Expansive in theme, tone, and subject matter across its six sections, Playlist for the Apocalypse defies generalization and…
“To What End?”: Lorenzo Bartolucci on A Room in Dodge City, Vol. 2: The Blut Branson Era, a novel-in-vignettes by David Leo Rice

Why do you want to be a writer? It came up casually, over dinner, but I’ll never forget the way David Leo Rice paused (rather uncharacteristically) to consider a question he didn’t seem to have bothered with overmuch on his own—which may be the simplest definition of a vocation, after all. And I’ll never forget…
The Pastor, a novel by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed by Titus Chalk

For Liv, the titular pastor in Hanne Ørstavik’s 2004 novel—translated from the Norwegian for the first time by Martin Aitken—language is the original sin. Indeed, God spoke the world into being, perhaps why Liv’s faith is wafer-thin, and why she so is deeply troubled by the violence inherent in language, the binaries it creates, the…