Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Tara Van De Mark Reads Diana Oropeza’s Debut Collection An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance by Diana Oropeza arrived by mail, slipped out of the envelope, through my hands, and onto the hallway floor. The size of a passport, it landed next to a banana peel and a pile of junk mail and I worried that this treasure would, like the subject it ponders, disappear. Instead, it…
New Music Essay: “How I Got into Free Improvisation” by Peter Valente

I remember as a teenager living in Fairview, NJ, and going down to the corner store and finding a cassette of Ornette Coleman’s Art of the Improvisors. I grew up listening to classical music and opera and I knew there was something about the sound of free jazz that I liked but it would be…
Fiction Review: Andrew Fort Reads Dustin M. Hoffman’s Collection Such a Good Man

Whose America is it? The subject of Dustin M. Hoffman’s collection Such a Good Man is, by sheer percentage, masculinity in Middle America. Represented here are good fathers, bad fathers, and in-between fathers. There are husbands who are trying hard and husbands who aren’t trying very much at all. There are laborers, house painters, framers,…
Bad Survivalist: Three Poems by David A. Kirschenbaum & Sean Cole

Colorado Naropa—1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998 Naropa—1996 I missed you and now miss you. I mean, not now, because you are here. (I just touched you.) Of course you did. After all I’m newly 40. 15 years since pilgrimage to show Ginsberg four poems. July 4th picnic, him making graphite pizza from all my drivel.…
Gerald Wagoner: Four Poems for Bad Survivalist

Your Second Marriage The instant she spoke you knew it was coming. When she wanted you to meet him, it was a long freight trainlaid out across a distant prairie sky. You knew something was coming.She fucked you suddenly on Monday. The train stretched over yellowing grain. A black horizon on a fair weather day. She white…
Poetry for Side A: “Mantle of Bread” by Tina Cane

On the front Napoleon refused to eat Russian bread dark and heavy as a mantle it was du pain pour Nicole he said before feeding it to his horse this story is of course too delightful to be true but I do confess I like keeping it alive in the telling tonight trees are bowing…
The Future Has Poetry: “Poem (hive emoji flag mind)” by Ben Tripp

hive emoji flag mind waking up virtue no quality but in repetition parasocial, brutal efficiency, it is its own counter-effect. The paradox of tolerance, and the un- tolerable, de facto exceptionalizing horoscopes today read simply “cut” and I rode the train with caution, drafting apology letters for later in my mind already. I held up…
Adam Camiolo Talks to Celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan Author Pip Adam

Pip Adam is the celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan author of four novels, including New Animals (2018), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and her latest, Audition, which was published in the U.S. by Coffee House Press in June. The novel is a profoundly strange but deeply moving exploration of life in the margins of society, the…
Book Review: Beau Farris Enters the Orbit of Monica Ong’s Visual Poetry Collection Planetaria

In Monica Ong’s newest book of visual poetry, Planetaria, she doesn’t just write poems, she constructs systems. Drawing from astronomical charts, family photographs, speculative science, and myth, Ong builds a constellation of visual devices that call us into orbit. Her poems are not static pages but interactive mechanisms; volvelles, planispheres, and family photographs shape the…