Author: Heavy Feather

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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
Two Flash Fictions from The Future by Soramimi Hanarejima

Renewed Sensitivity Your distrust of people is verging on paranoia, and although I remain exempt from your unfounded scrutiny, talking you down from your suspicions has become ever the drain on my energy. So I spike your contact lens solution with meds that will sensitize your eyes to the good in others. Or more accurately,…
Newer Testaments, a novel by Philip Brunetti, reviewed by Nora E. Webb

Beautiful, haunting, and decidedly subversive, Newer Testaments invites us to explore the metaphysical, the hypothetical, and the hallucinatory. It follows an unnamed narrator in his journey of escape—first from the Facility to which he admits himself, and then (yet also simultaneously), from the compelling need to write his continuation of “The Revelation of John.” Our…