Author: Heavy Feather
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Five Fictions by Matthew Beach
There She Is A woman in a pantsuit arrives first. She opens the lockbox and takes the key. She steps into the living room. The air washes over her, a wave of vinegar, astringent and thick. She draws back, brings her fingers to her nose, then crunches in heels over tattered carpet, calcified from encrusted…
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Téa Franco Reviews Maureen Aitken’s fiction collection The Patron Saint of Lost Girls
In Maureen Aitken’s collection The Patron Saint of Lost Girls, linked stories sure to compel and move, Mary grows up in Detroit, where poverty, addiction, and death are all parts of her daily life. A story of triumph over violence, poverty, sexism, and more, Mary displays resilience throughout her childhood and young adulthood against the…
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You Could Stop It Here, Stacy Austin Egan’s debut fiction chapbook, reviewed by Kim Loomis-Bennett
Stacy Austin Egan’s prose chapbook, You Could Stop It Here, is an encounter with a memory snag that just won’t smooth out: youthful regrets, missed chances, and ultimately transformative ordeals that wake us in the middle of the night—rumination from an adult perspective. Like encountering someone you used to love in an unexpected time and…
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“Trial of the Hippocampus,” a poem by Sarah Cheshire
Her: uproarious laughter— a narrow staircase—Me: cheap cologne— wilted rosemary on the windowsill—Her: distant voices— strong hands— breathlessness —Me: mildew— snow— a single half-burnt candle— Them: but which came first, the beerOr the laughterAnd was it you who let his rosemaryWither—(And when you say your rosariesDo your sons prayFor him like his…
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Brat, a graphic novel by Michael DeForge, reviewed by Ryan Werner
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. For years now Michael DeForge has been building these fucked-up worlds that sit on top of and inside our own world all at once, as if there’s a dimension we can’t comprehend where we’re all just twigs or neckless shapes with the same problems of simply not…
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“Contact Improv,” a poem by Jack Meriwether
I just want to go where nobody’s gone before.All the people here look so tiredBut that’s what keeps them together.I used to believe in perfectible beautyNo I used to think the world couldn’t hold meNow I know it can’t.She said slide your hands over each otherThe surfaces becoming floor and bodyAnd floor and bodyInterchangeably.She said…
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The Book of Transparencies, a literary detective novel by Jefferson Navicky, reviewed by Laura Nicoara
The Book of Transparencies begins (or does it?) in 2005 when an unnamed narrator, an adjunct professor at a community college, comes across a “slim anomaly of a book with an ash blue cover” in the library. This is the (other) Book of Transparencies, written by William Bolzebados three decades before, an autobiographical “collection of…
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Zuri Etoshia Anderson Reviews The Death Scene Artist, Andrew Wilmot’s debut novel
What makes an actor? Do they have to have star-studded fame, perfect teeth and a reputation for great acting? Or do they have to be closet catastrophes, marred by drugs, relationship issues, anxiety and identity crises in order to create their stardom? Why not both? Andrew Wilmot addresses these types of questions and more with…
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Leonard Temme Reviews Laura Catherine Brown’s Novel Made by Mary
Made by Mary is an intimate, compelling, tightly plotted, enjoyable novel about an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship. The mother is the fifty-five year old Mary. The daughter is the thirty-year old Ann, the name shortened from Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment. Well before the novel begins, the daughter rejects her exotic name for…
Heavy Feather Review 