Author: Heavy Feather

Side A Short Story: “Dolphin Adventure” by Robert Long Foreman

Stan arrived home late and flopped like an upright dolphin into his and Linda’s house. Dolphins are almost never upright. When they are it doesn’t last. They don’t have feet. They barely have skeletons. So when they try to go upright they hit the beach with a wet slap. They swim upward all the time.…
“Interview”: Ben Segal Talks to WORKS Author Grant Maierhofer

Grant Maierhofer’s Works collects four separate books into a sprawling volume that functions simultaneously as a compendium and a bildungsroman, showing a range of work and the development of a singular writer through various stages of literary production. I initially planned a to write a conventional review the book, but I prefer conversation to critical…
“Heavy Feeling”: A Review of Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor

“Sometimes the unseen is more terrifying than what’s in view,” writes Gina Nutt. In a horror film, the camera passes over empty rooms, training the audience to look for what may or may not be there. Almost scarier than the figure that appears is the one that doesn’t, the feeling of dread left unfulfilled by…
“The Echo Lasts and Lasts”: Loss and Renewal in Donna Vorreyer’s To Everything There Is, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

To Everything There Is, the title of Donna Vorreyer’s new book of poetry, immediately brings to mind the bible verse from Ecclesiastes and the Pete Seeger song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Everything has its season we’re told, and we know this to be true. A time for everything under heaven. What it doesn’t suggest, however, is…
Side A Poem: “My Breakdown Is Like Buster Keaton Trying to Smile” by Jessie Janeshek

My Breakdown Is Like Buster Keaton Trying to Smile I keep looking through binocularsover and out toward the rivercalories are negotiablebut in every rendition I have a black eye. It’s all about pratfallsmy globe-sized stomachgarroted or garrulousand/or love before breakfast. Oct/Nov adjust the knobit always rains in my dreamseven the one where I’m swallowed into…
“Two Little Stories about Black Beans”: A Flavor Town USA Fiction by Eli S. Evans

1. I was in my twenties and living in the sort of apartment one lives in in one’s twenties, ramshackle and tumbledown on the wrong side of town. But it was very spacious, and I subsidized my income, which was both part-time and meager, by subleasing out various of the rooms I didn’t use as…
“The Literature of Doom-scrolling”: Gabriel Blackwell’s Correction, a review by Gillian Perry

Reaching the end of this collection, or novel, or account, or whatever this book is to be categorized as, Blackwell acknowledges, “And then of course there is the internet.” Rescue Press’s 2019 Open Prose Selection, Correction does more than just acknowledge the internet—it displays the multifaceted way in which the internet has changed our thinking.…
“Another Space We Share”: Hillary Leftwich Talks to Poet Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Poet and Editor Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum took time to answer questions on his latest poetry collection, Visiting Hours (Texas A&M University Press), and how myth-making, space, and honoring the voices of those who have departed all play a central part in not only his writing but how he views the relationships around him. McFadyen-Ketchum is the…
“The Parts We Play”: Jesi Buell Reviews Theatrix, poetry plays by Terese Svoboda (Anhinga Press)

chance but a chainof electrons vibrating[almostendlessly] only error shitting life I watched Matthew Holness’ Possum right before I picked up this book. That may be why I felt the puppet on the cover of Terese Svoboda’s Theatrix: Poetry Plays held such a sense of foreboding. Both puppets have that same disturbing anthropomorphic face that is…