Author: Heavy Feather

“Ma’am, This Is a Wendy’s”: Brittany Micka-Foos on the Everyday and the Existential in Katie Berta’s Poetry Collection Retribution Forthcoming

In Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, Retribution Forthcoming, nothing is sacred—and everything is. This earnest, probing collection interweaves the everyday with the metaphysical. From skincare to smartphone-scrolling to microwave entrees, Berta interrogates the mundane and the minute to expose the existential crisis simmering underneath. The result is a blurring of boundaries: a confluence of animal…
Poetry Review: Jesi Bender Reads Ae Hee Lee’s Collection Asterism

A gift of a dozen blue eggs. My father cracks one over the pan and provokes its yolk with a fork. Come and see—it doesn’t tear. I mutter a prayer: may my life be as tenacious. Asterism is the 2024 Dorset Prize winner, which is given to a full-length poetry manuscript each year by Tupelo Press. The…
Fiction Review: Bruce Overby Reads Ellen Birkett Morris’ Novel Beware the Tall Grass

In her wonderful debut story collection Lost Girls, EllenBirkett Morris delivered 17 stories that explore in heartrending prose both the vulnerability and the power of the feminine. In her debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, Birkett Morris maintains her focus on the feminine in the person of her protagonist, Eve Sloan, a new mother deeply…
Seven Poems from the Future: Jerome Sala

The Last Words of the Replicant, or, Blade Runner Revised “I have tasted flavors of which my fellow replicants have never even dreamed … I have consumed Sweet Mango Pringles in South Koreaand Hawaii-style Poke-bowl crisps in Hungary.I have gobbled down chocolate-coated snacks in Finland and Lasagna-flavored potato chips in Thailand.But I have never understood why…
Fiction from the Future: “Civic Duty” by Meaghan McDavitt

Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked down at the blue and yellow lights. The electric voice reverberated through her mind, a robotic repetition of itself, relentless, forcing her to make the the decision. Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked at the surrounding cubicles. The maze of decisions.…
Side A Poetry: “The Strategy of Tension” by Christopher Blackman

The Strategy of Tension At a bar, lobsters millin the corner claw machine,waiting to be pulledfrom their situation,from brine into boilfilling the room with the smellof displaced sea, pluckedfrom bedrooms to be usedin amusements, consumedby men in cargo shorts.Not to quote Dostoevsky,but this might be our greatest sin:destroying and betraying ourselvesfor nothing. Friends,I don’t need…
Short Story for Bad Survivalist: “Clashing Perspectives” by Kim Farleigh

Waiting on the top of a hill to catch a bus to Agra, we saw vehicles below fleeing from traffic lights. Then: deceleration, swerving, horns bleating, collisions narrowly avoided, vehicles creeping around something on the road fifty meters from the lights. Seconds later, another metal spine started accumulating behind the lights. Unsuspecting vertebrae, stretching on…
Fiction Review: Mia Carroll Reads Wes Blake’s Novella-in-Flash Pineville Trace

In Pineville Trace, Wes Blake tells the story of Frank Russet, a former revival preacher who has escaped from a minimum-security prison in Kentucky, where he was being held as a con artist. As Frank and his feline companion named Buffalo journey west to freedom, Blake paints a triptych of the escapist—his newly forged existence…
Fiction Review: Aidan Loevlie Reads C.H. Hooks’ Second Novel Can’t Shake the Dust

With Can’t Shake the Dust, C.H. Hooks further demonstrates his dexterity with symbolism and paradox. His second novel examines fate and trauma through one family’s relationship to the dirt track. The story is narrated by 14-year-old “Little” Billy Lemon, his father “Wild” Bill, and his mother Nanny. From the first sentence, Little’s mind is on his…