Author: Heavy Feather

Titus Chalk on Sterling Karat Gold, an award-winning experimental novel by Isabel Waidner

Isabel Waidner’s Goldsmith Prize-winning new novel is a cri de coeur from a Tory Britain battered by inequities. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 and prescribed brutal spending cuts as an antidote to the Financial Crisis, the country has become a callous place. But worse, since the 2016 Brexit referendum emboldened charlatans, liars,…
“Notes on Ann Lewinson’s Still Life with Meredith,” a book review by Peter Valente

Ann Lewinson’s novella Still Life with Meredith is fantastically perverse, erudite, essayistic, and precise as a laser as it navigates high and low cultures and literatures. With the passionate eye of a critic, the narrator flirts with Lacan and Derrida and with raw sexual language. The result is a novella that is funny, bizarre, unhinged,…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Beer Can Chicken Primer: Revised” by Avery Gregurich

never ask the scout leader about the troop’s beer can chicken recipe because you are not and were never a scout of any kind. he makes it better off duty anyway, down the hill in his driveway where the divorce camper is parked. all recipe-makers now implore you to get that charcoal hot, crucify that…
The Celestial Bandit, a tribute anthology to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell

Some writers’ legends are so large that they are usually read about rather than read. The author’s work takes on such a large, imposing existence that intimidates us and forces us to learn about the work through the life that produced the words; Joyce, Proust, Kerouac, to name a few. Oftentimes the life behind the…
Selected Poems by Michael Gottlieb, reviewed by Steven Fraccaro

Michael Gottlieb’s concerns are striking in their intensity—I was tempted to write his “poetic concerns,” but they are more than that, if one may say so. In commenting on his work, the author has enumerated his themes as language, the city, and the life poets face. This is accurate, as far as it goes. But…
An Impossible Love, a novel by Christine Angot, reviewed by Titus Chalk

Christine Angot’s latest novel to appear in English, An Impossible Love, is an elusive read. Slippery to pin down in terms of its genre, the story also transforms in our hands after a pivotal reveal recontextualizes everything that comes before it. Not only the story’s content, but Angot’s aesthetic, too. Without wanting to give too…
Side A Flash Fiction: “Causality” by Anita Goveas

Causality When my placid younger brother scalded himself on his sixth birthday, the first time he ever cried, my mother declared it was inevitable and cultivated a hobby of having accidents. She could no longer touch a newspaper or our dog-eared copy of 1001 Nights without a papercut that rendered her helpless and table legs…
“Maggie Siebert’s Dead Kitten as the Persecution of Consciousness by Reality’s Imitation of Eternity”: Charlene Elsby’s Review of Bonding

“Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” is the final story in Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t leave you, because it elucidates something fundamental to the persistence of the terrible—a fundamental premise we know to be true, but which isn’t made explicit except by madmen and metaphysicians. Maggie…
Sift, a new poetry collection by Christian Hawkey, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

The cover for Christian Hawkey’s first collection of poetry, The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), features a stuffed, anthropomorphized duck standing on the edge of a bed and staring blankly at itself in a mirror. Tinged in an orange glow, the cover is quite uncanny, since we as viewers are led to see ourselves…