Author: Heavy Feather

The Future: “Really Good Puppets,” a short story by Jill M. Talbot

Things can be people, when you get down to it, and this can be dangerous. It is most dangerous when a puppet becomes a person and fights back all it has been used for, or when a person becomes a thing and is so thing-like that it forgets that it ever was a person. These…
“Targets,” a Bad Survivalist essay by Kay Smith-Blum

Who breaks their arm planting bulbs? Well, technically, I was retrieving bulbs, from a box on the other side of the low-rise-industrial-wire fence they put up around small urban gardens at street level to keep out the dogs that don’t keep out the dogs. Why build a fence just high enough for me to trip…
Bad Poet, 100 bad poems by Brian Alan Ellis, reviewed by Charlene Elsby

Spread out over two pages at the start of Bad Poet is the sentence, “I write bad poetry and I don’t care.” So if you believe Brian Alan Ellis, you might as well put down the book right then, because it’s bad and you don’t have time for that. But the poems aren’t bad. They’re…
All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest poetry collection, reviewed by Juliana Converse

As I read Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest collection of poems, the world is in quarantine as we wait out the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, we heard the coronavirus would mostly affect the already vulnerable, the elderly and the immunocompromised. Children were thought to be less at risk, and if you were between the ages…
Tom Griffen’s Response to The Worming of America, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women, a historical novel by Autumn Leaf

Please, do not get comfortable. To worm is to move with difficulty. To worm is to foist one’s way into. To worm is to make a rope smooth by winding lengths of fiber between preexisting strands. To worm is to create momentum through artful and insidious means. To worm is to move as its namesake—in…
GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted, an essay by Dennis James Sweeney, reviewed by Frank J. Crone

“If you don’t believe in ghosts, you don’t believe in your own interstices,” says Dennis James Sweeney in his latest chapbook GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted. Sweeney gifts us a formalistic yet pleasurable read that points out how we don’t have to go far to find the ghost(s) haunting all of us. Providing…
Circus + The Skin, the first novel from Keith McCleary, reviewed by Kelsi Brown

The premise is a deceptively simple one: A man walks in with tattoos that form a pattern he doesn’t understand, and asks me to explain. And I can’t explain. No matter how you got those tattoos. It’s not important anymore. It’s the skin that keeps you safe. Or ignorant, which is close. They will call…
“Nothing Not Nothing in Jeff Alessandrelli’s Poetry Collection Fur Not Light”: A Review by Michael Sikkema

Magic not poetry Ongoingness not epiphany Absurdism not nonsense The 32nd of December not New Year’s Poetry not magic Fur Not Light, Jeff Alessandrelli’s second book with Burnside Review Press, has had me wandering its psychogeography for a week. First off, to be clear, Fur Not Light led me to flip Guy Debord’s idea of…
“Empathic Editors”: 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…