Author: Heavy Feather

Five Poems by Vanessa Saunders

Blame It on a Woman Blame it on a woman. She who argues not for the accuracy, but for the integrity of our Art. How I could not sleep. The slow systemic death of our garden. The sound of your voice. All of your belongings, just as you left them. Baby, I’ve found God. Are…
Bad Survivalist Fiction: “Abandonment Issue” by Jason Hardung

Up in the corner, above my bed, a spider floats in the air. I’ve been watching it for an hour now. It must be magic, the way it hovers like that. Like everything else it’s reminding me of Krista. The first day she arrived in the Amazon she emailed me a video of a huge…
“The Minister’s Black Mass,” a short story by Chase Dearinger for Haunted Passages

When the fireplace was so full that the air grew heavy and beads of sweat broke out across his forehead, Tom went to bed. But the hallway where he expected to find the doors to his family wasn’t the narrow, wood-paneled one he expected. What he found instead: floral wallpaper, rose-tinted golden sconces, thick red…
“Outside the door there is an animal writing my name in the blood of other animals”: William Lessard Interviews Adam Tedesco, Author of Mary Oliver

With the publication of Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019), Adam Tedesco gives us a cycle of poems that places topics like addiction and recovery outside the expected psychological frame. A video artist as well as a poet, Tedesco brings a fluid sense of medium as well as outlook. The result is not Robert Lowell-style confessionalism…
A Haunted Passages Excerpt from A Spectral Hue, a horror novel by Craig Laurance Gidney

For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l’oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink,…
“Hear the Chorus Underfoot”: Jesi Buell Reviews Alice Hatcher’s Novel The Wonder That Was Ours

“How hard a thing is life to the lowly,and yet how human and real!”—W. E. B. Du Bois The Wonder That Was Ours begins innocently as a Caribbean cabbie picks up new passengers but quickly maneuvers past increasing racial, psychological, and ideological tensions until it crescendos at an apocalyptic fever pitch. The narrative and topical…
House of the Black Spot, a graphic novel by Ben Sears, reviewed by James Ardis

House of the Black Spot is the latest in Ben Sears’s Double+ graphic novel series. This is my first experience with Sears’ work, yet the world he imagines leaves an instant impact. In Bolt City, where much of the book’s early action takes place, there are streets lined with vibrantly-colored buildings and hovering robots capable…
Kelsi Brown on Miraculum, a carnival novel by Steph Post

“‘Step right up, gents! Step right up, ladies! That’s right! Prepare to be astounded, confounded and utterly shocked beyond your wildest dreams!’” The perception of the carnival as a happy place with the central purpose of bringing amusement and joy to the crowd gets waved to the side in this fantastical realist take on…
Settlers, a poetry collection by F. Daniel Rzicznek, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

In his latest collection, F. Daniel Rzicznek leads readers through a world ripe with abandonment and haunted by fragments of a past that are as mysterious as they are important, at least within the attempt to make meaning in the face of loss and desolation. Make no mistake, Settlers is full of life: fathers, dogs,…