Author: Heavy Feather
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Bad Survivalist Microfiction: “Chess Problems” by Steve Chang
—after Diane Williams and James Robison Brian returned from the world and found Charlene was deceiving him again. He liked visiting her in her studio, a short distance from his mind. “That’s enough,” he said. “Charlene.” He was raspy and eager, but with a prickly thumb. It now prickled. She was beside the window, scribbling…
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Spiritualist Erotica by Erin Lyndal Martin: “The Flower Medium” for Haunted Passages
I wrote down my findings about what happened that night, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell everything. Not even to you, Lieutenant. I hear you’re old and sick and you may die soon. I sure hate to lose you. You saw the force through some hard times, and no hard time ever met a…
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Micah Zevin Review of Jack Foley’s When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs (Sagging Meniscus Press)
Narrative lyric traditions like the Irish ballads and folksongs traverse all cultures and languages and peoples, often engaging subjects like mortality, a life lived and reflected upon or death and the afterlife to come. Echoing Walt Whitman, Jack Foley uses song as a tool and a teacher in When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs, for both…
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“Wish Me Poetry”: Alexis Quinlan on Sarah Sarai’s poetry collection That Strapless Bra in Heaven
It’s the winter of 2020. Despite a life swimming in poetry—despite poems in morning email and poems in backpacks all day, despite poems on “devices,” poems for students, poems at night—I sometimes wonder, What is poetry good for? This is hardly a terrible question. Poetry is like god: if she exists, she can deal with…
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Yelena Moskovich’s Two Dollar Radio novel Virtuoso, reviewed by Hayley Neiling
Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso weaves together the stories of several women. Zorka and Jana grow up together in Prague under the oppression of Soviet communism. Struggling to find their identities and sexuality amidst the chaos and hardship of their everyday lives, eventually they go their separate ways, but not without leaving lasting impacts on one another.…
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“If you can’t look away, you might as well laugh at this egg heist tragi-comedy”: Cassandra Luca on Deb Olin Unferth’s new novel Barn 8
Just as we continue to ask, “if a tree falls, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound” we might also ask, “if 500 people plan to remove nearly one million hens from commercial barns, without attempting to make a political statement, is it still a political statement?” Deb Olin…
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Bad Survivalist: “A Neutralized Threat,” comic fiction by Analeah Loschiavo Rosen
It does not seem overly harsh to say the men and women who work on atomic weapons distance themselves from the moral implications of what they do. But me? I make sure they pass through clearance and are able to find parking spots. Not so much separates us when you think of the worst-case scenario.…
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Noreen Hernandez Reviews Michael Chin’s Story Collection Circus Folk from Hoot n Waddle
The circus exists in a foggy space between reality and fantasy. It’s a place I’ve visited in person, at the movies, or on television. My first memories of the circus include laughing with Bozo on my lunch hour from school or staring wide-eyed during a Ringling Brothers spectacle. Eventually, the luster of the performances faded.…
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Nance Van Winckel: “Hole in the Fence,” a hybrid collage/graphic/poem-story excerpt for Bad Survivalist
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled…
Heavy Feather Review 