Author: Heavy Feather

“Buoyant Also”: Liana Jahan Imam on Aisha Sasha John’s TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED

Aisha Sasha John’s most recent chapbook begins with a short page that might double as scrolling titles at the start of a horror film: “In the fall of 2018, I left Toronto for Vancouver—the city where I spent the bulk of my childhood and in whose suburbs my parents still live.” On a separate line:…
Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach on Expendables, a poetry collection by Emma Villazón

In Emma Villazón’s own words, the title of her first collection Temporeras, or “migrant woman farm hands,” translated by Thomas Rothe as Expendables, compares the precarious labor of temporary female farm workers with the labor of female freelancers who “manufacture intellectual property” for companies whose “raw material is the word.” Although, for the speakers in…
Boyfriend Perspective, a debut collection of poetry by Michael Chang, reviewed by Stephen Scott Whitaker

Queerness, in Michael Chang’s Boyfriend Perspective, expands infinitely outward and inward in this full-length collection by the non-binary poet. Chang not only navigates western culture dominated by norms inherited from the patriarchy, but also Chinese culture and its own restrictions with regards to gender and sexuality. And we are challenged by Chang’s poesy and content,…
“The Stories We Tell to Keep Ourselves Alive”: Wendy Bourgeois Interviews Thea Prieto

Thea Prieto’s debut From the Caves, winner of the Red Hen Novella Award, contains an entire post-apocalyptic world that is both empty and claustrophobic. In the core days of a blazing summer, four people fight for survival with only each other and their storytelling to drive them forward. Resources are catastrophically limited; the world is…
“The Reasonable Liminality of Silent Hill 2”: Chris Kelso in Conversation with YouTuber Jacob Geller

As an educator, I can confirm my controversial belief (and with some certainty) that video games are the nascent form of cultural expression in the 21st century. It might be time for us all to emerge from Plato’s cave and accept that some of the traditions we know and love are dead or quietly dying.…
“Cordyceps,” a flash essay by Sher Ting

Did you know cordyceps colonizes the bodies of carpenter ants, chemically hypnotizing them to ascend to the highest point in the environment before releasing a mushroom cloud of spores? I have been told a hundred useless facts, with bread and a butter knife on the train to Oslo. The man next to me, knotted in…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “where the space ends” by Anthony Santulli

even maps know that point of view is a lifeless music—that the next sense to evolve will only create further desire to escape from experience at intermission, the utterance of terms we barely notice (these things happen in the cracks, their particular hiss) …
From Vol. 9: “In My Dreams There’s No One in the Maternity Ward,” a poem by Tessa Livingstone

I keep having dreams they take her from mewhen I hadn’t finished. I wanted her more. I wander halls in search of nurses. Babies.Their open mouths. Their frantic chantings. Nothing stirs here—only the peahenwho roosts in tall open trees, scratches at leaf litter, preens brown plumage. A listless planet in orbit,gravitating in and out of…
“Picking,” a collaborative short story by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross from Vol. 9

I’m picking lemons from the lemon tree beside the back porch of a man I met a week ago at a fundraiser for the local cat shelter. Cocktails and Cats. I was mostly there for the cocktails, Josh was mostly there for his ex-wife, Maggie. She’s one of the shelter’s directors. “She’s my best friend,”…