Author: Heavy Feather

“Skullface” by Rick Claypool: A Novel Excerpt for The Future

1. A mutant wakes up screaming alone under harsh beams of laboratory light. The humanlike thing cries and clings to its too-small blanket. High up where the wall meets the ceiling, expressionless scientists observe through soundproof shatterproof glass. Its face is a skull face, and when it touches the bony surface of those knobs and…
Frederick Arias: Opera kitsch for Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede by Mike Corrao

Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede emphasizes the ludological role of abstract anatomies and how they project different erotic instances from the artificial carapace that those bodies redesign in the act of reading through their garments and organs. In the rhizomatic level of the composition of the text, those organisms reduplicate themselves as they…
Esteban Rodríguez Reviews Edinburgh Notebook, an Action Books poetry collection by Valerie Mejer Caso

There is no telling what anyone’s reaction to death will be, but for many putting pen to paper helps process the void that is felt in someone’s absence. For Valerie Mejer Caso, Edinburgh Notebook is a testament to the power of language’s ability to heal and to help come close to answering the questions we…
Maria Judnick Reviews Call It Horses, a Dzanc Books epistolary road novel by Jessie van Eerden

“I write you about the dead. I write you to stay alive and, after all this time, I write you, still, to become myself.” The opening page of Jessie van Eerden’s latest book Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize, draws us into this compelling epistolary novel that the narrator Frankie is…
Haunted Passages: “Swamp Thing Explains How Time Passes in the Middle of Dueling Crises,” a poem by Jack B. Bedell

It’s never a matter of value. When I’m standing at the edge of the cypress grove looking over the coastline, I can tell it’s receding, inching back into the swamp. No doubt the water’s rising. It’ll drown us all. Eventually. It’ll lick away every piece of swamp I stand on. But it’ll do it with…
The Future: “The Wormhole Nextdoor,” a short story by Tara Campbell

A story about potholes, black holes, wormholes, and cats, told in the form of a Nextdoor thread, in hope of a friendly interstellar future. Click on the animated GIF to begin! Or click here to read “The Wormhole Nextdoor.” Tara Campbell (taracampbell.com) is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received…
“The Seedier Angels of Our Nature”: Derek Maine on Reading Body High by Jon Lindsey

Los Angeles is an almost incomprehensively vast place. The expanse opens up a world of nooks, crannies, and hiding places for the seedier angels of our nature to roam. In The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s brilliant 1939 Hollywood novel, the scaffolding of celebrity and glamour coating the myth of Los Angeles is torn…
Kissing a Tree Surgeon, Eleanor Levine’s short story collection, reviewed by Judy T. Oldfield

On page 133 of Eleanor Levine’s story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, I sat up straight, thrown for a loop at the name Diane Lewis. Though the marketing and jacket copy never refer to the collection as a novel in flash or linked stories, as a reader, I had thought of it as one; every…
Maria Judnick on Sydneyside Reflections, an Everytime Press travelogue by Mark Crimmins

For the last year in much of the world, many of us have spent most of our days at home. We have memorized every freckle on our partner’s faces, walked every street in our neighborhoods, cleaned out every closet, and baked a lot of bread. For some, this time at home has been invigorating. For…