Author: Heavy Feather

“A fact I wore like jewlery”: Dan Alter Reviews Green-Wood, a Nightboat Books poetry collection by Allison Cobb

As far as what we must do in the crisis of humans and our environment, at least this much seems clear: poetry will not be the key field of battle. Nonetheless, some of us, for whom poems are an essential mode of understanding, need to write about poetry about it anyway. And so we’re led…
Noreen Hernandez Reviews The Wagners, a booklength poem by John Colasacco

The Wagners, a poem, tells the stories of different generations of Wagners. Or, that’s what we are told on the back cover. I tried, but couldn’t keep track of the Wagners because the bits do not form a historical family narrative. But it doesn’t matter, because the poem is a journal of the sensations that…
Give It to the Grand Canyon, a novel by Noah Cicero, reviewed by Zachary Kocanda

The novelist Nelson Algren was called a “bard of the down-and-outer,” a writer whose characters were people ignored by literature. Noah Cicero’s new novel Give It to the Grand Canyon continues this storytelling tradition by recording the deeds of the down-and-outers who scoop ice cream for tourists in the Arizona desert during the summer. In…
Hillary Leftwich on Monique Quintana’s Debut Novel Cenote City

Monique Quintana’s debut novel Cenote City drowns us in a surreal world of magic, folklore, and modern-day characters with their own tales to tell. The men and women in this collection all have their own battles to fight, and Quintana’s craft of spinning ancient ritual mixed with the present-day creates a vulnerable, fantastic tragedy that…
Tales from the Crust, an anthology of pizza horror edited by David James Keaton & Max Booth III, reviewed by Ann Davis-Rowe

I love pizza. I could eat it at least every day, perhaps even every meal. So when I had the opportunity to review Tales from the Curst: An Anthology of Pizza Horror, edited by David James Keaton and Max Booth III, I was stoked! But also, admittedly, a little concerned—what if these stories turned me…
“Dissonance, Shock, and the Inevitable Truth”: Gay Degani Chats with Sandra Arnold

Both the title of Soul Etchings (Retreat West Books, 2019) by Sandra Arnold, the cover with its crackled baby-doll faces, and the uncapitalized chapter titles throughout, prepare the reader for the unease found in the pages of this collection of very short stories. The author seduces us into her world, subverting expectations, almost always putting the…
“Ghost Tree,” a concrete visual poem by Tara Campbell for Haunted Passages

InMuirWoodsthere areredwood treesthat are completelywhite, lacking allchlorophyll. They’re called ghost trees, and theydot the forest, ivory boughsglowing against a backgroundof cinnamon bark and pine-needle green.Because they don’t have chlorophyll these albino trees aren’t able tophotosynthesize. They can’t producetheir own food, relying instead on nutrientsfrom the redwoods around them, absorbed throughan underground network of roots and…
Cathy Ulrich’s Ghosts of You, a fiction collection from Okay Donkey, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

In the short story collection Ghosts of You, Cathy Ulrich rips apart familiar mystery tropes of noir fiction. Like a seasoned gumshoe, Ulrich dirties her hands, digs through sensationalism, and ignores the obvious to search for clues. She opens up the spaces between what the readers think they understand and the truth. These aren’t whodunits.…
“Trump or Wile E. Coyote?”: A Current Events Quiz by Tara Campbell

Choose A, B, or C for each of the numbered items below:A) Real or proposed border control measureB) Scheme to capture Road RunnerC) Both 1) Firearms2) Cement3) Dogs4) Mirrors5) Gas (sleeping/tear)6) Electric spikes7) Black paint8) Invisible paint9) Dropping anvils10) Cactus Costume11) Shooting legs12) Portable hole13) Exploding tennis balls14) Giant balloons15) Misleading instructions16) Steel plates17) Moat…