Author: Heavy Feather
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Peter Valente on Larry Fagin’s Peaches & Gravy: Selected Poems 1966-2016, edited by Miles Champion (Cuneiform)
In free improvisation, one requires quick responses to shifting musical realities. Instinctive unity of mind, hand, mouth is required: out with the ego. You need to be quick, “on the fly,” then it’s gone. It’s about aiming for the Total Sound, heard in part. When it works: success of the ultimate dares. In this way,…
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“We’re Not Static”: Shauna Gilligan Interviews Jeannine Ouellette
Jeannine Ouellette’s stories and essays have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Curt Johnson Fiction Award, Margarita Donnelly Prose Award, Proximity Essay Award, Masters Review Emerging Writer’s Award, two recent Pushcart nominations, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Medill School of Journalism.…
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Island of the Innocent, Diane Glancy’s Turtle Point Press poetry-hybrid consideration of the Book of Job, reviewed by Dan Alter
Diane Glancy’s new collection of poems and hybrid writing Island of the Innocent is a grand work of what my tradition calls midrash (elaborating on, weaving new stories into, the canonical texts) on the Book of Job. An acclaimed writer of Cherokee descent, Glancy brings the ancient text, via a Christian, King James English, into…
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“Notes on a Procedural Cityscape”: Joshua Rothes’ We Later Cities, an Inside the Castle Castlefreak novel, reviewed by Mike Corrao
Joshua Rothes becomes the second victim of Inside the Castle’s Castle Freak Remote Residency for Generative Digital Composition—which requires the afflicted writer to create a 100,000 word manuscript in five days using bots/Twine-builds/neural networks/etc. Whatever means necessary. The first book to come out of this was Mike Kleine’s Lonely Men Club, which utilized the probability…
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“Shiny Shiny,” a Flavor Town USA short story by Mollie Schofer
When you live in a forest, there isn’t much to do but lie on your side and eat the open oysters offered to you by woodland sprites. (Open oysters are open like two palms cupping a skein of fresh-molted salamander skin.) Sometimes, of course, the woodland sprites are in a mischievous mood. They dust the…
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Fablesque, a Tupelo Press poetry-hybrid collection by Anna Maria Hong, reviewed by David Epstein
Let’s assume the superlatives are sprinkled all throughout. Fablesque is a poetically expansive volume, a house in three wings, with each wing containing, if not multitudes, then dozens of rooms. The rooms themselves are in every architecture, from personal archeology—where Anna Maria Hong offers her family history in thin threads of heredity: impetuous ancestry plus…
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Saturday Morning Chapbook: Ryan Bollenbach Monches Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets (Radioactive Cloud)
My immediate connection to Mai Ivjfäll’s Sick Sonnets was through the band Ceremony. In their first single (“Sick”) from their 2010 album Ronhert Park, the singer litanizes on things he is sick of, many of the complaints directed at hardcore itself. At the time of Ronhert Park’s release, the band were hardcore darlings, and the…
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“Lessons Unlearned”: A Bad Survivalist Poem by Colby McAdams
It’s true, in order to stay relevantI try to learn one new skill every yearNaturally, I must forget one too. My memory, lacking resonance, picked-over and ebbing. I was a reader one spring, and a writer the next,Then suddenly I (blissfully) wasn’t either. I’m telling you, for years, ducking in and out of traffic,struggling towardsa…
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Three Haunted Passages Flash Fictions: Becca Yenser
Tornadic Weather The Midwest throws neon-colored food at us. We have something microscopic in our throats. The trees procreate with pink, twirling helicopters that Carmen decides are magical. We go to a festival about a truce, called Truce Fest. We are trucing about colors of skin. You find a pair of earrings. Everything is pink…
Heavy Feather Review 