Author: Heavy Feather
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“On Slipping Code”: Stephanie Strickland’s new and selected poems How the Universe Is Made, reviewed by Alexis Quinlan
Like many, I come to Stephanie Strickland via the digital. In the winter of 2009, she brought her laptop to the Poetry Project’s lectern. A video loop of waves crashing soon appeared on the projector screen. At the top of each swell, in dainty, spidery cursive font, a fragment of her poem “slippingglimpse” pitched forward…
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“Accidental and Inevitable”: Marcus Pactor Talks to Christian TeBordo about His Short Story Collection Ghost Engine
Christian TeBordo’s Ghost Engine has everything I always want from a short story collection. These pieces are darkly humorous, formally inventive, oddly angled, and full of hard, electric prose. It deservedly won the inaugural Bridge Eight Press Prize, and it probably deserved to win a few other prizes too. It is one of the best…
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“The Straw Man”: Wednesday Work Day Interview by Hillary Leftwich
Wednesday Work Day is a series started by editor Hillary Leftwich to showcase and support creatives who offer services, both in-person or online, and are impacted by the pandemic and the shutdowns both statewide as well as in other countries. The series will showcase one business or individual that is still able to provide a…
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James A. Reeves: “The Diver,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction
My mother believed life should be graceful and clean, much like the way she entered the water when she was young. She had been a diver and, for a time, the most famous woman in town. Especially once she began killing people. She was an all-city legend, a state champion and regional medalist with a…
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Haunted Passages: “Maxwell House’s Demon,” a short story by J. Thomas Murphy
She woke up to the rain and a vague sense of unease. The unease she attributed to the melancholy weather. The rain was nothing new. She started as usual: eating quickly, dressing slowly, letting the morning contain its own patterns and rhythms that she knew the rest of the day could not conform to. On…
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Esteban Rodríguez on Arrows, Dan Beachy-Quick’s seventh poetry collection (Tupelo Press)
At its core, poetry seeks to examine the relationship between things, and although there are many ways in which poets achieve this, no one quite does it as thoughtfully as Dan Beachy-Quick. The author of six previous poetry collections, Beachy-Quick’s newest book Arrows explores love, faith, philosophy, the constraints and usefulness of language, and the…
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Haunted Passages: “Derek, Ricky, Umar, Gael,” a short story by Jackie Sizemore
The first ghost law was supposed to get everybody on better terms with their resident ghosts, but whoever wrote that didn’t know my newest roommate, Amber. Amber is a four-and-a-half foot tall teenage ghost that blew into my apartment two months ago. The whole apocalypse thing was a while back, but everybody knows there are…
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Tyler Dempsey Fishes Lake of Urine, the debut novel by Guillermo Stitch
Two beginner tricks of competitive memory are 1) create a memory palace and 2) occupy it. The more absurd, obscene, lascivious, and odorous the occupants—the better. Take, for example, Abraham Lincoln masturbating your mom in a childhood bathtub as a raven consumes a severed breast on his top hat. Exhibit B: Max Headroom juggling a…
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“When the Chicken Slowly Cooks You Back,” a short story for Flavor Town USA by Harrison Cook
When my grandpa was on the farm, she snapped around one thousand chicken necks and in one day killed, boiled, and dressed over one hundred chickens by herself. Word travels fast in small town Iowa; hops county to county and before long my grandma, or more so the image of the frenzied farm wife snapping…
Heavy Feather Review 