Author: Heavy Feather

“Netflix Closed Captioning,” a poem for Bad Survivalist by Jeffrey Hecker

[Rapid downbeat funky relaxed happy soulful witchy jazz music starts playing] [Wurlitzer muffles sobs] [Cadavers gurgle blow bubbles that suck and pop] [Ceiling fan blade claps like elephant seal] [Upbeat demented ska funeral music stops playing] [Flava Flav’s Unga Bunga Bunga remix starts playing] [Dime drops into coin-operated dryer not enough to activate spin] [All…
Stephen Daly Reviews Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s Nowadays and Lonelier

Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s Nowadays and Lonelier lives up to its title—it is a book our times and the recent past—a world of alienation, dysfunction, misery, despair. Gray-Cosgrove’s finely-honed senses seemingly absorb all she encounters, and when she writes, all of these sensorial observations are put on the page, and we are right where she wants us.…
“Nude Fridays in Whitelandia,” a Bad Survivalist Short Story by David Winner

The Zoom Wake Pretty soon after Louis’ passing, I had an idea. Zoom wakes were everywhere, but this one would have been different. On our six screens, you would see our bare chests. We range from our twenties to our fifties, but like Brooklyn Peter Pans, we are known as the “boys.” An old-fashioned characterization…
“In Praise of Quiet Things”: Jesi Buell’s Review of Karen Shangguan’s Graphic Novel Quiet Thoughts

*Ed.’s Note: click on images to view larger sizes. “There is natural poetry in stillness” The world wants you to be loud. With so many people and so much competition, we’re taught that in order to be heard, we have to speak the loudest and be the most outrageous. Writers in particular are taught to…
Henry’s Chapel, a novel by Graham Guest, reviewed by Christopher Lura

If we are to take Graham Guest’s new book Henry’s Chapel as a novel—and it is a novel, let’s be clear—it might be described like this: it is a story of a group of people—of a family, for lack of a better word—living off the grid somewhere in the backwoods of East Texas. There are children—Henry, an…
“mundane objects: the therapist’s office,” a poem for Haunted Passages by E.A. Midnight

This room is too big for its own good. Strangely oblong and withering, the way this whole building is. About a year after the flood, the county hospital began the process of relocating its offices from this building to the new campus a couple miles away. The new campus is sprawling, with plenty of room…
“the silence feat. uranus, neptune,” a poem by Michael Russell

in the new dubfor season 3 of sailor moon, the outer guardiansuranus & neptune are lovers who came from the coldestpocket in space, the unstitched hem of our galaxy.their mission: to burn through the silenceglaive pressed against the thin cherry blossomof a human throat. their throats, maybe—ours? boyfriend, on a crowded street how many planets…
“Pennies on Train Tracks,” a Side A flash fiction by Catherine Chiarella Domonkos

Pennies on Train Tracks You taught me to lay pennies on tracks to get flattened. Smooth brown ovals we stowed in this Skippy jar we buried under the house like pirate treasure. You showed me the brightest places on the tracks are best to get really flat pennies because that’s where the wheels make the…
“Plastic Ecologies, Plastic Lives: Sam Taylor’s The Book of Fools” by Patrick Thomas Henry

In his new hybrid-form collection The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse, Sam Taylor charts an eco-poetics that frames the remote atolls of the self against the present calamities of climate change. Taylor’s tools for this creative cartography are found forms, lyrical essays, visual experiments, and the accumulated detritus of culture, from…