Author: Heavy Feather

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,…
Operating Systems, a poetry collection by Joe Pan, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

The title of the Joe Pan’s poetry collection, Operating Systems, refers to the operating systems underpinning society, from the interpersonal to the international, as well as the operating systems of poetry. The collection is divided into four sections of five to seven poems each, and a long prose poem that constitutes all of section five.…
“Field Journal,” a poem-hybrid by Phil Spotswood

the last scientist does not know where the others have gone. he searches the corners of the stone hearth for bacteria—to prove that there were breathers, once—that oxygen roiled. he rolls out dough to watch the yeast rise, for movement outside of himself. he breaks bread with his own two hands and says that this…
Fiction by Marcus Pactor: “Cake”

—after Blake Butler The cake reminded me of the twins’ wet sludge food. I could never shovel it well enough for them. My wife often replaced me halfway through their meals, as a mercy. I did not slice, then, so much as scoop dessert into a bowl. It tasted of egg and hair. That last…