Author: Heavy Feather
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Side A Video Poem: Catherine Heard & Gary Barwin’s THE MOST CHARMING CREATURES
Music was created by Barwin using Max/MSP programming language abstracting the recording of the spoken text into a haunting soundworld of ambiguous time, measured by the subterranean sound of a beating heart. Mini-interview with Catherine Heard & Gary Barwin HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as collaborators (or continues to)? GB:…
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Justin Sun Reviews prepoems in postpanish and other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Victor Rodríguez Núñez
On the home page of jorgenriqueadoum.com, there is a rotating carousel of pictures. Jorgenrique Adoum lighting a cigar, Jorgenrique Adoum smiling. Printed across these pictures are three quotes: one of Adoum’s shorter poems in its entirety and excerpts from two others. Which strikes me now as ironic. Since, as I made my way through Katherine…
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Nemerov’s Door, an essay collection by Robert Wrigley, reviewed by Francesca Moroney
I’ve come to contemporary poetry late in my life. Just a few years shy of half a decade, I began to study its craft—both as a reader and as a writer. I was first introduced to the brilliance of Robert Wrigley’s work through his poem “Ode to My Boots,” from Anatomy of Melancholy and Other…
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And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, a poetry collection by Amy Beeder, reviewed by David Epstein
When Polish-born Joseph Conrad was asked why he wrote in English, he said “Because Flaubert was already writing in French.” That’s the risk you’ll take reading Amy Beeder’s And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey: that you’ll want to find another language to write in because there’s no way you can possibly compete with…
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In the Antarctic Circle, prose poems by Dennis James Sweeney, reviewed by Marin Killen
Dennis James Sweeney’s writing in In the Antarctic Circle (described as “hybrid narrative prose poems” by Autumn House Press) makes stillness, silence, and formlessness visible. Whiteness is both the inviting emptiness of a blank page waiting to be marked, and the terror of an unmappable landscape. The narrator and their only companion, Hank, stagger through…
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Saturday Morning Chapbook: Chase Burke’s Lecture (Paper Nautilus) reviewed by Nick Almeida
Chase Burke’s stunning chapbook Lecture (Paper Nautilus Press) is filled with tumbledown geniuses. Armor is a recurrent image, and penmanship hurts. These narrators are, as you perhaps guessed, vulnerable in the way a good teacher might be. Okay, good may be the wrong word. These are the swept-up sort of lecturers, their pockets filled with…
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“What’s Missing?”: Benjamin Kinney on the Quest for Identity in Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone
Joshua Schulman is a modern-day Pac-Man: powering his way through a path he cannot predict, all while being haunted by ghosts of his past. At the beginning of Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone, Joshua is collecting more retro video games than he will ever be able to play; thinking about his…
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Side A Poem: “A Power or Ability of the Kind Possessed by Superheroes” by Kathleen Rooney
A Power or Ability of the Kind Possessed by Superheroes If death is a specter that devours everything, then making friends with death would be a good superpower. What if you had a superpower but it was really banal, like the ability to beat anybody in the world at checkers? My meditation teacher, June, probably…
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Anton Pooles: Three Poems for Haunted Passages
He Did Not Listen Now his bones are neatly displayedon a table like a museum piece. “They shine like hard boiled eggs,”his Mother says proudly. Then her tone darkens,“put them back where you found them— let them be a warning to alldisobedient children.” The Creature Beneath the Porch Knock on wood. It followsas I pace…
Heavy Feather Review 