Author: Heavy Feather

“Dad’s House,” a short story from The Future by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

I go to the café with my machine, but I’m followed by a smell. No one else around seems to be bothered by it, and though it’s intense, acrid, sour, like my dad’s dirty toothbrush (how could he have kissed our mother after shoving that thing in his mouth?), I make myself get used to…
Bed, a poetry collection by Elizabeth Metzger, reviewed by Ben Tripp

The fundamental operation of Elizabeth Metzger’s new short poetry collection Bed is a careful reduction: the mortar of her true life experience shines as a thing somewhat negated or at any rate sublimated and newly preserved as a partial element in this ripe synthesis, which seems to also subversively toy with the idea of poetic…
“Embodying Language”: Fani Avramopoulou on Desire and Damnation in Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door

Composed of hundreds of loosely arranged narrative fragments, Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door tells the story of Soviet immigrants haunted by a turbulent past. Moskovich takes traditions of Russian literature—namely crime fiction and a journey to hell—and spins them into a surreal world filled with violence, sex, and cryptic symbolism. The result is…
“Forsaken”: Gay Degani Interviews Jayne Martin

A stick of dynamite is about the size of a banana. It doesn’t necessarily look dangerous, but it carries with it a huge blast. This little book reminds me of TNT. I thumb open the The Daddy Chronicles and find the prologue is titled “Ode to the Lone Sperm” followed by this first sentence “Eager…
“Lurking,” a short story by Tam Nguyen

For P.A, C*, J, P, D, and friends The campus’ hallway remained silent since the university’s closure earlier this year. Education was halted after the coup took over. As soon as different parts of the country slowly turned into battlefields, faculties and students got together and constituted a union, partially to create a self-didactic community,…
Six Micros from The Future: Matt Leibel

Out of Office Jeff wrote an out-of-office email: “Off to the future, back Wednesday the 21st.” Of course, in the future, he didn’t have this job—no one had jobs. Everything was automated and people just sat around thinking, dreaming, playing videogames. He liked this, so he never returned, never invented the systems that made this…
“WE NEVER SEE ANYTHING CLEARLY”: Notes on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters by Peter Valente

It is autumn and there is a chill in the air. As I write, there are major exhibits of J.M.W Turner’s work in Boston and Texas, and that brings to mind the work of John Ruskin, the writer who knew very early the importance of Turner’s paintings. As I think of Ruskin’s work, and his…
“What Their Spirits Have Denied”: Robert Crooke Reviews A Heaven of Their Choosing by Joann Smith

Many of the elegant stories in Joann Smith’s debut collection turn on moments of sudden insight. In “Phlebotomist’s Day” a dissatisfied wife awaits her biopsy result and confronts the subtle reluctance of her spirit to know itself. A young mother struggling with an adopted toddler’s nightly terrors faces her own spiritual attachment disorder in “You’re…
Dave Fitzgerald on Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell

One of the first things I did after the initial wave of COVID-19 sent me and my 10,000 some-odd coworkers at the gargantuan state university where I work scurrying home for almost five months of quarantine, was pull The Brothers Karamazov down off my bookshelf—one of those dauntingly hefty classics that I’d always meant to…