Author: Heavy Feather

The Ambrose and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art, Matthew Kirkpatrick’s haunted exhibition catalog from Acre Books, reviewed by Joe Sacksteder

After spending a couple decades pretty bored with art museums, I’ve fallen in love with these spaces in the last couple years. I think the change occurred because my comprehensive exams at the University of Utah were focused on aesthetic theory and interdisciplinarity, and so I emerged from those intensive studies with a broadened view…
Kara Dorris Reviews Adam Crittenden’s Poetry Collection Blood Eagle (Gold Wake Press)

In her poem “Spring,” Mary Oliver writes, “there is only one question: how to love this world.” And, at first glance, Adam Crittenden’s poetry collection, Blood Eagle, doesn’t seem to have an answer; yet, by dissembling illusions, by using irony and precision to cut away the dead flesh of our delusions, these poems take the…
“Sixty-Four Opportunities in the Snap of a Finger”: Davis Schneiderman & Ruth Ozeki Discuss Her Novel A Tale for the Time Being

“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”—Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being Lake Forest Reads: Ragdale is a community reads program in partnership with the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest College, and the Friends…
“Midwest Antique Mall, Financial Troubles, Kidnapping, Etc.”: Alex Higley Talks to Luke Geddes, Author of Heart of Junk

Luke Geddes and I first bonded on Twitter over our shared admiration for the little-loved novelist Wright Morris. Like much of Morris’s work, Geddes’s novel Heart of Junk, published by Simon & Schuster in January, follows an idiosyncratic assortment of distinctly Midwestern characters whose chief—or perhaps only—commonality is the place they live: Wichita, Kansas, or to…
Bad Survivalist: “Hobby,” microfiction by Tyler Dempsey

I’m not even sure you’ll get this. They’ll convince you it’s from Earth, ancient. They (those in power). History’s changing. Eventually, no philosophy (maybe there already isn’t) suggesting we were a species of action. It was politics. Started in politics. Create emotion. Reactionary. Like a soccer game. Left, Right, hobbies. The home team. Candidate most-viral…
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…
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…
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…
“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…