Author: Heavy Feather

Artist Spotlight: Four Visual Poems by Sarah J. Sloat

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Sarah J. Sloat reminds us that even in our digital culture writing is about texture. Combining words, images, and erasure, her work exposures the landscape residing within every page. Sloat is a poetic detective that looks behind the whiteness. At her hand, the line of text moving…
“To Be in a Time of Extinction,” prose poetry by Violet Mitchell

—after Etel Adnan To find a list with macaws, to read of the eastern cougar, to try to imagine the sound of its growl, to set down the list and your diet cola, to check the time, to check the calendar, to find a pen, to write a grocery list, to forget detergent, to…
“Puritan Remnants,” an excerpt from Time’s Up! A Memoir of the American Century by Robert Cabot

Blending history, essay, travelogue, and autobiography, Time’s Up! is a personal and political saga: luminous, probing, and absorbing. At constant odds with his Boston Brahmin lineage and upbringing, Robert Cabot confronts white privilege, rejects the conventional trappings of wealth and fame, and critiques our American heritage of colonialism, imperialist yearnings, and penchant for perpetual war. In alternating…
“A Night, Like Any Other, or Ooh, That Smell,” an excerpt from Gristle, weird tales by Jordan A. Rothacker

Gristle is alchemical theatre, a collection of weird tales, twelve fingers on the steering wheel, with D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath asleep across the back seat, Chekov shivering on the hard shoulder… Gristle is a post-beat riddle, a comedy, a nightmare … Gristle is Salinger descending from his eyrie with a bottle of Thunderbird. Jordan…
Micah Zevin on Brendan Lorber’s if this is paradise why are we still driving?

Can we ever escape the hidden meanings of existence, the state of saying or doing one thing and meaning another? What to make of the silences, the pauses, fissures, elisions, we find in conversation or on the page? What can be mined from what’s missing? How will the gaps or empty spaces be filled if…
“Report of the Justification Committee,” original fiction by Jona Whipple for Bad Survivalist

We could not take the polar bears. We tried, but we couldn’t do it. By then, they were mostly extinct anyway, and the specimen that survived weren’t worth the trouble. We couldn’t take the snowy egrets, but downloaded all of the poetry about them and scanned every major work of art featuring them, which we…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “Self Portrait, Australia” by Annie Hulkower

You could bounce a quarter off the soles ofmy feet, thanks to a lengthy study in not wearingshoes, this keeps me moving across the outback.I smell like: hard muscles, desolation,am swift like a mammal. If you peeledthem back, you’d see somethingelse snaked through my plantar facea—it’s what keeps me moving. These days, it seems my…
Serialized Essay: “The Great Indoorsman, Part the Last” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE LAST From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Out-of-Doors vs. Outside: In Lawrence, Kansas, a Lyft driver asks me where my accent’s from, says she’s lived lots of places, says she has a good ear for accents, says that I do a good job of covering it up, but that I…
“History Repeats and Stories Become Complete”: Fabulations, minimalist short stories by José de Piérola, reviewed by Mark Crimmins

José de Pierola’s Fabulations is an impressive and deeply stimulating collection, one that explores a diapason of forms and modes as it slyly reinterprets the implications of its title. Fabulism, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is one of the favored modes of a new generation of writers who have moved on…