Author: Heavy Feather

Layla Saleeby on Soft Fruit in the Sun, Oliver Zarandi’s debut story collection from Hexus Press

Despite its focus on surreal body horror and strange characters who lick alleyway walls or get eaten by their children, Oliver Zarandi’s short story collection Soft Fruit in the Sun surpasses the limitations of shock value, instead developing over time a complex picture of paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, and emotional detachment from the world. Soft…
Rayanna Pinnock on Like Wings, Your Hands, Elizabeth Earley’s sophomore novel

The relationship between any mother and her son is a complicated one to build and define. At its surface, Elizabeth Earley’s novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, seemingly aims to simply do just that—to explore the complicated lives of a mother and her son. As soon as the novel beings, the reader experiences the realization that…
Haunted Passages: “Samples from a Wichita Mountains Ontology,” a hybrid haunting by Seth Copeland

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. One summer a man fell while rappelling in the Narrows//We could hear him moan up on a cliff/his friends bright puffy squirrels circling//A helicopter lifted him out to Oklahoma City//We never heard what his next ascent was / purple horsemint flanks the lakesidetower\\we gargoyle the boulders keepingpeople…
“The Over/Under: A Triptych,” HAunted Passages fiction by Melissa Benton Barker

1. The Solid and the Vapor I was sitting on the sofa in my yoga clothes when the phone rang. I had just finished watching a re-run of The Office with my husband and children. My children had gone upstairs to brush their teeth and get ready for bed. “Melissa, you need to come over…
Furies: Thus Spoke, O’Brian Gunn’s first novel in a series, reviewed by Ann Davis-Rowe

2019 brought no shortage of onscreen not-so-superheroes, from Amazon Prime’s televised interpretation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic The Boys to Thanos just wanting to save the Marvel Comic Universe in Avengers: Endgame. Into this fray, O’Brian Gunn brings us the Alpha-Omegas—human-types with previously dormant superhuman genes that begin to unexpectedly spring into action.…
Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner Kate Wisel’s debut story collection, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is, on one level, author Kate Wisel’s homage to the friendship of women. It also looks at our preconceived ideas of youth, women, poverty, and choice. Serena, Frankie, Natalya, and Raffa live in working-class Boston. They navigate through the pain in their lives by smoking, drinking, and driving around…
Essays One, the first nonfiction essay collection by fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis, reviewed by Marcus Pactor

Lydia Davis requires little introduction. She is well known for her innovative short fiction, her lone novel, and her many translations. But Davis has also published a number of essays over the past few decades and, at long last, has begun to compile them in two volumes. Essays Two will be published in the near…
Callista Buchen’s debut prose poetry collection Look Look Look, reviewed by Christen Kauffman

Look at the mother—the way her body is a house, a machine, a haven, a raw collection of love and devastation in the wake of her children’s entrance into the world. Look at how her body becomes foreign, becomes open wound, becomes blood memory, is reborn at the bottom of the sea. Look at how…
Because What Else Could I Do, the tenth poetry collection by Pitt Poetry Series Author Martha Collins, reviewed by Sarah Sarai

Visually delicate and emotionally substantial, the fifty-five poems in Martha Collins’ tenth collection, Because What Else Could I Do, interrogate the expectation inherent in connection, here, the poet’s with her husband, whose death set up a barrier to comprehension (“as if the fact were a mass of lead”). There is a poetic narrative of discovery…