Author: Heavy Feather

I CAN SEE YOU WRITE #1: Cathy Ulrich

This is Lucy. I CAN SEE YOU WRITE is a collaborative project where I work with writers to create interactive and/or generative poetry and stories. You write stuff and I write code and we come up with a visual narrative and user experience built for the web. The sky and JavaScript is the limit. In…
“Aviatrix Tricks”: Thomas E. Simmons on C.L. Nehmer’s Finishing Line Press poetry collection The Alchemy of Planes

C.L. Nehmer’s debut book, The Alchemy of Planes, reflects on Amelia Earhart. It intercuts a birth-to-end biography with a handful of imagined—but for the most part historical—scenes. Those historical scenes include Earhart’s service in World War I, her love of flying, her marriage, and her celebrity. Earhart’s celebrity was well-earned. She was—to cite just one…
Two Poems by Ori Fienberg, Originally Published in Vol. 10

Novelty Trade Treaties There’s no way to make a profit on a callfor international unity, no way to solve adistribution function without a point of sale;you have to learn to accept, you have tolearn to just say, thank you to thank you;it’s an ill-wind that blows no ships into portto deliver this gentle tyranny of…
Flavor Town USA: Three Poems by Jennifer Martelli

We baked pearls made of denture material in a blueberry pie —Efferdent Commercial The first satisfaction is the fork breaking the flaky lattice crust. No, I’ve misremembered this commercial: the first satisfaction is this: the fork digs deep into the purple fruit filling, doesn’t break the dough, fishes deep down into the pie, the berries,…
Bad Survivalist: “there is this instrument called a gnomon,” a poem by Ryan Rowland

—for Nicky J There is some tool called a gnomon I guessit measures shadowsSprayed by the sun I’ll tell you this now I know nothingOf tools I speak more of shadows shitYou can’t measure. Ask her for the truth theseShadows from the sun and only the oneSun strong enough to make an orchidpossible at Home…
Postal, a Boss Fight Books nonfiction title by Brock Wilbur & Nathan Rabin, reviewed by Andrew Rihn

Postal by Brock Wilbur & Nathan Rabin is intelligent, compelling, and infinitely more lighthearted than the video game it chronicles. As a piece of nonfiction, Wilbur & Rabin combine personal anecdote, interviews, and cultural criticism with a deep dive into the history and backstory of the 1997 game Postal. Although a relative non-gamer myself, I…
“Bear Control”: A Short Story by Jennifer Lynn Christie for Bad Survivalist

Part I: The Beginning When I was small, I had dreams of the zoo. Putting mammoth-sized kibble in a bowl for the elephants, communicating with gorillas by hand, making sure the seal got her little fish. The painful, but necessary vaccine, the shot that might put a suffering tiger out of an agony that, even in…
“Gostworks”: 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…
The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, a new sci-fi novel by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell (Spaceboy Books)

Genre tropes are rarely taken seriously by ivory tower literati, which is to their detriment given the wonderful writing that flows from a variety of pens. Through this work, we come to understand present predicaments and make sense of arbitrary situations, much like myths did for our ancestors. In Jordan A. Rothacker’s latest offering, The…