Author: Heavy Feather

Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…
Jonah Davis on GLOSS, Rebecca Hazelton’s new poetry collection

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.William Carlos Williams If the seductive cover, with its sensual cover image split in half, its glamorous pinks and reds, and the title’s undulating cursive font—if these weren’t striking enough, Rebecca Hazelton’s new book of poems, Gloss, begins with the attention-grabbing poem “Group Sex.” What…
Ugly Music, a poetry collection by Diannely Antigua, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music is a lyrical collage that meditates on childhood, trauma, survival, sexual identity, love, loss, and the often complicated journey through womanhood. Antigua’s poems never shy away from subjects that are unfortunately still considered taboo in today’s social and political environment (sex, masturbation, lost pregnancies, etc.). Ugly Music is a…
Stay, a poetry collection by Tanya Olson, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Loss and departure can be tricky to write about; on the one hand, they’re something that every one of us has experienced in some shape or form, but on the other, that experience can be highly intimate and might not translate seamlessly to readers. Tanya Olson’s work, however, finds a way to make the personal…
“Four Poems by a Middle-Aged Woman”: Laura Lee Washburn

After the Surgeon Cuts You or the bone snaps in eight places,the world recognizes youas the vessel for their trauma. Strangers say, Chasing the dog,my third toe snapped rightin half. Or Straight up! No break but seven stitches betweenthe smallest and next. I wasstabbed in the headby a guy in a white mask. Or, Doctor…
Three Micro-Poems by David Tomaloff

In Defense of Clouds the absence of caterpillar time— / weighted under a weightless sky, / the ibis eyeing a sore spot / where the rain stops & the crunch leaks in In Synonymous touch an ear to the scarab— / how the sense to wonder is a why // how the sense to count…
Paul Cunningham Reviews & more black, t’ai freedom ford’s second poetry collection

“prehistoric afro futuristic antagonistic / ragamuffin natural mystic slapboxing pugilistic / cosmic slapstick beautiful black lips slathered in chapstick / fucking plagiarists made ya fists twist backwards blackness.” Funked-up with the dark of the Gothic, with the hip-hop of the future, with electric vibrato and too much to swallow, t’ai freedom ford’s & more black…
“Sa (funeral koans)”: Poetry by Yohnmean Yoh

1 Secretary of State Dean Acheson actually greeted the invasion with relief, as it justified massive military appropriations that were essential to carrying out the vision of American pre-eminence outlined in the top-secret National Security Council Report 68 of April 1950. —Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed” (2016) … rhetoric would not have…
Wendy J. Fox on Great American Desert, short stories by Terese Svoboda

I was first introduced to Terese Svoboda when I picked up her collection Trailer Girl (Counterpoint, 2001) in a bookstore while I was in graduate school. I still have the hardcover. I was writing my own stories then, but also trying to write a novel for my thesis—well, I thought I was writing a novel,…