Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry Review: Rob Stanton Reads Kimberly Lambright’s Collection Doom Glove

Kimberly Lambright’s debut collection, Ultra-Cabin, introduced a poet possessing that one thing we all—surely?—want from poetry: a genuinely original way of seeing the “nothing new.” But she also knew that a surrealism that veers too far or too quickly into the wholly other is always going to be less striking than one which remains rooted…
Fiction Review: Tara Van De Mark Reads Amy Stuber’s Collection Sad Grownups

At a time when many of us are feeling low, Amy Stuber’s debut story collection, Sad Grownups, accepts this truth and, in doing so, helps reorient us to something like a middle ground. The stories embrace the rawness of life, its trauma, failure, despondency, grief, how our hurt little kid selves never really leave us, and…
“There Is So Much to Unlearn”: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz by Jax Connelly

When I was sixteen, I had a fat crush on my boss at the grocery store where I scanned boxes of cereal and punched in produce codes for five dollars an hour. He was twenty-four, a community college dropout with dyed-black hair and a tattoo of a guitar stretching out over the back of his…
Fiction Review: Elizabeth H. Winkler Reads Jen Michalski’s Novel All This Can Be True

If you begin Jen Michalski’s All This Can Be True on the bus, you’ll almost certainly miss your stop. Written in alternating points of view, the book is as much a story of self discovery and queer coming-of-age as it is a story of love, and Michalski tells it well. Our protagonists are Lacie Johnson…
Author Annie Hartnett in Conversation with Rachel Reeher

Annie Hartnett is the kind of writer that makes you laugh when you shouldn’t. The kind of writer that, in one moment, has you hoping no one is looking over your shoulder as you crack up over utter tragedy, and, in the next moment, has you welling up over the most perfectly executed joke. Nothing…
Poetry Review: Jen Schneider Reads Elizabeth Galoozis’ Collection Law of the Letter

What happens when you combine the literary prowess of a skillful and soulful poet-librarian like Elizabeth Galoozis with the space to reorder understanding, instill voice in silenced letters, expand contractions into new shapes, and infuse original meaning into common language? As Law of the Letter illustrates, there’s the possibility of magic—magic in the form of…
Fiction Review: Emily Hall Reads Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross’ Collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way

In Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross’ short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way characters teeter on the edge of an epiphany. But they stumble before they can access any greater understanding of their lives. Some stories feature parents who can’t connect to their children, refusing to see how their own behavior is alienating.…
“Inescapable Derivation”: Matt Martinson Reads Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest

Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest, the only work of nonfiction she would publish in her lifetime, was first published in 1945 by Scribners, re-released by Dalkey Archive in 1994, and was recently re-re-released as a Dalkey Archive Essential. Recently, Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, has become a critical darling, a sort of lost classic.…
Joe Milazzo: Four Poems from Plain Language

Plain Language The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten.…