Author: Heavy Feather

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…
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, …
“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…
“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…
“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:…
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…
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,…
“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…
“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.…