Author: Heavy Feather

“A Brief Flash of Strangeness”: Adam McPhee in Conversation with Eric Williams

Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous Seaway in Austin, TX. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Protean, and Firmament, and he’s been nominated for a Pushcart and Best Small Fictions. His first book, Toadstones, is a collection of short stories firmly in the tradition of the weird…
“We, the Source”: Tara Ballard on the Resilience of Women in Maggie Queeney’s settler

In “Homestead,” Maggie Queeney writes: “We settled where stranded: / the hollow / Where the horse fell leg-by-leg” and “Now what holds us / Is the sweet water-swelled well”; before illustrating “the shape made of two bodies—one arm / Coiled round the other held down.” Like the well keeping the unnamed “us” of the poem…
Paul Dee Fecteau Reviews The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book! by John Reed

I did not try to cut out the artwork in John Reed’s The Family Dolls, released in book form in July by Outpost19. I am not saying it can’t be done, for I admit to being reticent with scissors due to a lack of dexterity which, among other things, makes it impossible for me to…
A Review of Michael J. Seidlinger’s Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma by Mark Ari

Michael J. Seidlinger’s new novella, Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma, opens with a definition. We’re told a runaway is “an idea, story, or mood that escapes the moment you are right in the middle of experiencing it.” Then we’re introduced to “a writer”—the only name given the protagonist—who wants to write but can’t. They’re stuck. A…
“Stubborn Laughter”: Robert Dunsdon Reviews The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha

Some poor fellow jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. “Mid-air,” says Iliana Rocha, “his bones split & feathered—he was lightness. His bones were braided wheat. Bones collapsed like a birdhouse of Popsicle sticks. He said his hands transmuted into doves, in a constant state of ascent like an apology.” These irresistible lines are but a…
“The Field of What Is Unsaid”: A Review of Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast by Hannah Riffell

Longing is universal, and heartbreak is as common as the cold, as any scanning of the literary canon will reveal. What the poet Lisa Hiton recognizes, however, is that the landscapes on which these universal longings unfold are wonderfully impressionistic, to the point of being somewhat unknowable to anyone besides one’s self. In Afterfeast, Hiton’s…
“Polarities of Love”: A Review of The Pact, poems by Jennifer Militello, by Aline Soules

Love. How does it manifest itself? How many kinds are there? What are its extremes? With The Pact, Jennifer Militello explores love through imagery, language, and leaps. She never blinks and investigates the subject from its outer edges to its core. The book is framed by two poems: “Agape Feast” and “Ode to Love.” In…
Haunted Passages: Three Poems from Mineral Planet by James Pate

[In the garden of gray latex foliage] In the garden of gray latex foliage / mouths eating out and eating in / trembling hands in front of the broken, seeping masks / a static emerald memory lodged in the back, reflecting the partylights / the bulb at the end of the hall at the end…
“Electricity in this Dehydrated Landscape”: A Conversation with Vi Khi Nao by Mark Ari

Vi Khi Nao is a true original, a fabulously prolific artist whose curiosity, creative energy, and talent are apparently boundless. She writes poetry, fiction, drama, makes visual art, and juggles several developing manuscripts at once. She’s the sort of person who will learn a new language to collaborate on a book with someone from another…