Author: Heavy Feather

“Defiance and Dilemmas”: An Interview with Michael J. Seidlinger by Hillary Leftwich

Is writing an act of defiance itself? Or do the dilemmas we face as writers push us into acts of defiance? Michael J. Seidlinger and I got comfy and chatted back and forth via email over a week’s timespan and sunk our literary teeth into the emotions involved with writing—more importantly, the defiance that often…
Two Poems for Flavor Town USA by Avery Gregurich

I Keep Guzzling Bug Juice, Thirsty As I Am I can never leave the Casey’s convenience store without myBug Juice. I just gotta have that sport cap thrill. It’s always gotthe Vitamin C I’ll need, and less sugar than apple juice. There’seven a Straw’ Nana flavor to boot! Some like it hot. Others drinkonly Whistl’…
Excerpt from SCARLET: Three Glitched Still Lives by Francesco Levato

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. SCARLET is a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life in lockdown. The titles of poems in…
Little Eyes, a new novel by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In its eyecatching green-and-white cover and deceptively simple title, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes offers a playful, incisive critique on what it means to follow a global trend in our increasingly connected, yet increasingly virtual culture. With the contemporary feel and multinarrative structure à la Tommy Orange or Marlon James, Schweblin invites us into workspaces, bedrooms,…
“Repetition Is Magical”: Jesi Buell in Conversation with Candice Wuehle, author of FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed

Candice Wuehle’s most recent poetry collection FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed centers around the magical elements of our everyday lives. Through cosmology, tarot, and alchemy, Wuehle is able to explore the dualities we encounter and transform them from binaries into continuums. I spent some time digging deeper into the collection with the author. Wuehle is the…
How He Loved the Bones, a new chapbook by poet Caitlin Scarano, reviewed by Jonathan Kelly

Caitlin Scarano’s latest chapbook How He Loved the Bones takes us on a journey of recovery as we traverse the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia—the locus of trauma both individual and collective. This work neither romanticizes nor condemns Appalachia; it situates the region within a broader mechanism of historical, patriarchal oppression while positing a…
Side A Video Poem Collaboration by Penn Kemp & Gary Barwin: “The Female Line”

A note on the media: Gary Barwin created the video poem in collaboration with Canadian poet Penn Kemp. Kemp wrote the text but Barwin set it with music and visuals and they both performed it. The Female Line Some small part of us is held in our mother’s egg whenshe is in our grandmother’s womb, …
“Distance and Memory,” a Side A Essay by Jason Zuzga

My grandmom Victoria (Tomaro) Stracquadanio born in Boiano, Italy, immigrant to Bound Brook, New Jersey, subsequently married John of Modica, Sicily. At the age of 21, I visited both towns. She, widowed, is suffering, at 99-years old, from vascular dementia at a nursing home near my mom’s home. My grandmom is now under the protocols…
“Cloud-bellies Full of Virgin Birds”: Arturo Desimone Reviews Tension: Rupture, poetry by Cutter Streeby, paintings by Michael Haight

In the prologue to Tension : Rupture poet Cutter Streeby admits to the unpredicted challenges of collaboration between two artists who, while using different media, deal with strongly interrelated autobiographical leitmotifs of substance abuse, resulting in a requiem for the past. The Tension : Rupture of the title seems to refer, therefore, not only to…