Author: Heavy Feather

“Ghost Town,” a Haunted Passages Short Story by Chris George

We stayed in the van while our mom gave the ghost tour. These nights scared my sisters. They didn’t believe in ghosts. One of them had told me once that they were staunch materialists. They were precocious, having an otherworldly knowledge of things they shouldn’t know. It was child’s play stoicism. But these nights they…
The Employees, a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, reviewed by Titus Chalk

Powerful men like to send things into space. Perhaps the darkness between the stars is the proximity to godliness they seek. Perhaps they want simply to untether themselves from Earth and its trifling concerns like workers’ rights. There is something of both these ideas in Olga Ravn’s latest novel, published in Danish in 2018, before…
Master of Rods and Strings, Jason Marc Harris’ debut novella, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

“The life of puppets […] is the dance of the fingers. Puppeteers of old—they say—would connect wires from their veins, feeding lifeblood to puppets to entice the spirits of the earth to enter them. Today, we do this with strings. You move, like so, and he moves. A thing is dead until it moves. You…
Side A: “the cinder path,” a poem by Zach Savich

the cinder path harder to writemyself a noteon the back of the eulogythan the eulogyit takes a long timeto tune and longerto trust sometimesthe captions say“[gentle minor melody]”sometimes “[windactivates the motionalarm]” the fantasyat thirty-nineis a hamburger inthe parking lot by the squatlighthouse scrap beachif you touch me herebelow the throatit smells of rainthere isn’t roomon…
How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, a poetry collection by Quincy Scott Jones, reviewed by teri elam

How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, Quincy Scott Jones’ poetry collection, crawls into the bloodstream, lays in wait, inching up the heat. His is an in-your-face look at race and culture, as much eulogy as history lesson, as much elegy as admonition. Jones, incinerator and extinguisher, understands the assignment he has given, coaxing…
“Black. Star. Pieces.”: Side A Poetry by Matthew Cooperman

Black. Star. Pieces. —for Rosmarie Waldrop 1 The gathering of parts to their parts, will there be gathering of parts? Time, in a word, reading. As in, where did the song begin? Go on. Singing the terrible truth of the world, a griot through an open window. Something happened on the day he died, I…
“Turning the Historical Romance Novel on Its Head”: Laurie Marshall on Leah Angstman’s Out Front the Following Sea

When an historical novel is done well it works details of setting and historical context into the story so deftly that we don’t realize we are being educated. Historical novels done poorly can quickly become exposition-heavy slogs that would be well suited for kindling in a remote cottage on the Scottish moors. It is my…
Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult, a debut novel by poet Kyle McCord, reviewed by Vincent James Perrone

Membership Where are you? On your evening off, your quiet morning, in the brief moments between longer moments of work and sleep and material responsibilities? If you are a member of the mostly secularized modern world, you’re likely looking for salves against alienation. Personal passions, pleasures, numbness, or revelry. If you’re a bit more well-balanced…
“Whispering Dominium”: Witness and Want in Corey Van Landingham’s Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens

Lately, I have been searching for acknowledgment. I have been studying the genesis of Western universalisms, identifying the need to push back against the disembodied voice of knowledge decided upon by Western European and North American countries, by men who declared their own godlike authority, and their way of seeing and doing, as representative of…