Author: Heavy Feather
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Bad Survivalist: Three Poems by Emily Pinkerton
Go Like This Write in front of mirrors. Talk to yourselfin the bathroom. Spend late nights alone.Wake early, follow the sun. Tread carefully.Forgive with a watchful eye and an ear to the ground. Emergency Control in case I emergency. I handleas indicated. I open. Door turnsand I emergency. I plan. Responseincoming. In case I need.…
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“This Sultry Thing Called Home,” a Bad Survivalist Poem by Dhwanee Goyal
Loosely after Katia Krafft, a French volcanologist. Also somewhat inspired by John Ashbery. There were no landscapes where I lived, only water, its animals. Still, my father used to come home with fire burning the ends of his moustache. You know the story of birth: how woman meets woman, shrieks for every tragedy that could…
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“Reacting to Crisis”: Tania Pabón Acosta on Margaret Emma Brandl’s Tuscaloosa (Or, In April, Harpies)
Margaret Emma Brandl’s new novella, Tuscaloosa (Or, In April, Harpies) (released this July as an eBook), tracks two sisters on their search for each other during the aftermath of a tornado that has ripped through Tuscaloosa. The book operates on two levels, both personified in sisters Kennedy and Esther. Not only do we witness the…
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As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea, a short story collection by Robert Wallace, reviewed by Maria Judnick
For thirteen summers, I rose early every morning for swim practice. I relished watching the sun rise as I did my laps, listening to the last early birdsong as the neighborhood stirred awake, pacing myself by the slow, steady wake of the swimmer in front of me as my mind wandered, pondering the big questions…
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“Finding Fruits in My Palms”: A Review of Katie Farris’ A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving by Tiffany Troy
Katie Farris’ chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, is more than a chapbook of haunting; it returns us to that distinctly humanist “point of wonder” of what separates human beings from animals. The Oedipean riddle by the Sphinx and Pico della Mirandola’s famous speech all point to humans as the two-legged…
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“Response as Strategy”: A Review of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
Around the time that Donald Trump became a serious presidential candidate, many Americans in the U.S. took an active interest in the prospect of conversation. Some believed in talking to white people about not voting for him, while others believed in not talking to white people already determined to vote for him. Each position seemed…
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Side A: “Taxonomy of Amnesia,” a poem by Tam Nguyen
Taxonomy of Amnesia I swear I’d trade my body to remember and instantly regret it. Ma and Ba—children of sweat-glazed faces, too-short ribs. Their spines the bridges connecting no worlds. Am I your son at all?The answer a teethmark left on a just-ripened bomb. Anywhere on earth my body will be hijacked by explosions, even…
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Side A Short Story: “Fragments in Color” by Chella Courington
Fragments in Color 1 When a kid I kept running away from home to see if Mama still wanted me. Never far and always to the corrugated camp near Sunset. I drank chicory with Maggie and chalked pink flamingos on the concrete. Tall yellow legs, long feathers with curved necks turned right. Beaks dark as…
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An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, a poetry collection by Heidi Seaborn, Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach
An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I could pick this book up for the title alone: funny and terrifying for the juxtaposition of insomniac and slumber, enticing for being set in a space where girls share their secrets, and thrilling for the chance to do so with the icon Marilyn Monroe. In Seaborn’s second…
Heavy Feather Review 