Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry Review: Sarah Giragosian Reads Jackie Craven’s Award-Winning Collection Whish

During the pandemic, it was commonplace to hear people talk about how slippery time is. The lockdown dramatized the strange and sinuous qualities of time, the ways that time can stall and slip off the surface of consciousness all at once. These properties of time are difficult to capture, although many poets have tried. Whish…
Poetry Review: Dan Hodgson Reads Diego Báez’s Debut Collection Yaguareté White

By the middle of her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip has worked “English” from a “mother tongue” to a “father tongue” to “a foreign anguish” by rubbing it against what “mother tongues” and “father tongues” mean in relief of slavery-era edicts bent on the “removal of tongue[s].”…
Side A Poem by YF Wang: “Love, There Is a Snake in Your Closet”

I think of you with tapeworms in my tummy, like Medusa had stuck her head through my vagina & at seventeen, Ella tells me she thinks she might be pregnant—“My mother is going to kill me”—she says over the bathroom sink, our skins tattooed by the mirror graffiti. A familiar tune rings out the Wellesley…
Fiction Review: Selene dePackh Reads Kurt Baumeister’s Sophomore Novel Twilight of the Gods

Getting swept up by Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Gods is something like being picked up at the airport of the town you grew up in by a favorite sharply funny nephew with ADHD and a brand new driver’s license. If you agree to the tour, he’ll drive you through all the places that have…
Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody is a collection of 52 poems edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, & Kate Lindroos; they call it “the essential James Tate” and the editor’s note says they thought of it as a “book of beloved favorites.” It’s a slim volume, and every poem in it will give readers the Monty…
“Portrait as Landscape”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White’s Poetry Collection The Under Hum

The Under Hum is a small book that is large and generous in so many ways: double the usual number of authors, and full of lines by modern working poets that “seed” the invented poetic forms and linguistic experiments of this collaboration. The Surrealist feminists have arrived and they come with ghostly memories and scars,…
Two Poems for Bad Survival by Jiji Lubis

Reluctant superhero eats brains for supper I sometimes butter them with diesel / and fry them at one-hundred-eighty-degree heat / for three hundred sixty seconds. / Or boil them in freezing rose water, / pricking them till they become mushy / as I wait for the water to boil. // Of course they seek to…
Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…