Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Jarrod Campbell Reads Nate Lippens’ New Wisconsin Novel Bastards

We collect memories and glean from experiences in the hope that they amount to something. Anything. We use these collections to fashion ourselves into something presentable. More human. We strive, struggle, fall short, and often fail. So much of what drives people to follow made up rules in order to play the game of life…
Poetry from the Future: Three Terms of Service by Sean F. Munro

TERMS OF SERVICE: Grip Semiotics & Class Diagnostics Grip pressure reveals your buyological gender, thumb-to-text tension, page-turn velocity, forearm torque, and knuckle-crack frequency. Palm sweat salinity indicates probable voting patterns. Your grip signature is compared against 4.7 billion normalized datapoints; deviations trigger Ergonomic Compliance Audits. Suspected non-binary grips are flagged for Re-Education Modules administered via…
“History in the Bed”: Elena Rotzokou Reads Yelena Moskovich’s New Novel-in-Verse Nadezhda in the Dark

Yelena Moskovich’s Nadezhda in the Dark begins in a room so still it almost seems sealed: two women in bed in Berlin, the lights off, neither speaking. From that nearly immobile setup, the book builds extraordinary motion. The narrator, a Jewish émigré from Ukraine, lies beside her Russian girlfriend, Nadezhda, while the dark fills with…
“Theseus, Snow: A Journey through Hindsight”: Abriana Jetté Reads Rosanna Warren’s Seventh Poetry Collection

Hindsight, Rosanna Warren’s seventh collection of poetry, looks back as it moves forward. A whiplash of recognition, we follow a speaker growing older alongside a country growing apart. The collection opens with “A New Year,” which features our speaker watching the landscape shift from behind the smutty windowpanes of a westward-bound train. She wonders whether…
Poetry Review: Marina Carreira Reads Hugo Dos Santos’ Collection Reduction in Force

In Reduction in Force, Hugo Dos Santos writes from the fraught position of an immigrant father whose sense of arrival has been tethered—perhaps too tightly—to work. While the book takes its title from the colorless language of corporate layoffs, its emotional core lies elsewhere: in the speaker’s effort to reconcile the displacement, masculinity, and care…
Fiction Review: Mel Kenne Reads Vincent Czyz’s Collection Old Man Evil & Other Stories

The twelve stories in this collection are introduced with an epigraph by F.G. Lorca relating to his idea concerning the nature of duende, in a quote by a renowned Flamenco singer who says, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Lorca concludes that “there’s no deeper truth than that.” His feeling was that “[t]he Duende,…
Fiction Review: Emily Capettini Reads Lauren E. Osborn’s Collection Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl

Lauren E. Osborn’s Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl opens with a dedication that is also a promise of what we’ll find inside: “for the insects and girls and those stuck somewhere in-between.” The stories that follow are at turns grotesque and funny, both timely and timeless for their exploration of femininity, monstrosity, and how thin…
Hybrid Essay for Side A: “Post-Mortem Report No. 0607-EX” by Atreus Fong

POST-MORTEM REPORT NO. 0607-EX EXAMINER: [REDACTED]SUBJECT: Male, 29 years old.DATE OF EXAMINATION: Ongoing. I. EXTERNAL EXAMINATION The body presents no visible or any obvious trauma. Facial musculature is disciplined; trained into neutrality. No signs of impact, struggle, or force. No outward signs that anything is, or even could be, wrong. This is typical. Observed behavioral…
Barbara Henning: Three Prose Poems from Boys & Men

Dan When I was in Detroit recently, my sister and I stopped at a restaurant at the Ford mansion. When we sat down, I heard a deep voice say my name. I looked up from the menu, and it was you, the maître d’. Forty years earlier, we met in a bar in Hamtramck. The…