Author: Heavy Feather

Future Home of the Living God, a novel by Louise Erdrich, reviewed by Sarah Elsasser

I was surprised to hear that Louise Erdrich has a forthcoming novel and was even more surprised when I was handed the book; the image chosen for the cover a grainy, technologically cold image of an ultrasound with the overlaid title: Future Home of the Living God. A prolific writer—this is Erdrich’s twenty-first novel, in…
Three Poems by b.g. thomas

big black wall a black woman must not ever assume that a smile means anything other than/ she is being sized up by the other/ to see where she stands/ how strong she might be/ what her heart might be made of/ that’s only if the other is accepting that black people are indeed…
“You Never Know What You’ll See”: A Conversation with B.J. Hollars by Ashely Adams

“Once upon a time there lived a bird and then that bird stopped living.” The straight-forward narrative of the Ivory billed woodpecker is the first line B.J. Hollars’ Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds, but this is more than a book about a bird. Hollars leads us through museum collections, Christmas Bird Counts,…
The Walmart Book of the Dead, a spellbook by Lucy Biederman, reviewed by James Ardis

When I turned sixteen, I started working as a stocker and cart pusher at my mother’s Walmart Neighborhood Market. She joined Walmart when I was twelve years old, a single mother trying to keep up with the skyrocketing rent in our Texas suburb. On morning shifts, my mom and I even worked together, scanning in…
This Is a Dream, a one act sci-fi screenplay by Success Akpojotor

CLOSE ON: A book is received by a black hand, and ensconces on the decorated table. INSERT. COVER PAGE TIME PILL BY DAVID OYEWOLE BACK TO SCENE The black hand opens the novel’s verso page and inscribes a legible and beautiful autograph across it; and returns it, to the Yoruba woman, in her mid-thirties, who…
Three Poems by David Welper

Reversals When I was a kid, my sister helped me button my shirts. We’d stand in front of a full-length mirror and I’d try to figure it out. Try to figure out mirror images. That’s really what she was teaching me. To look at myself. “What you see in the mirror is kinda the reverse…
Five Poems by Wren Hanks

My Binder is a Thundershirt ™ I need something stiff to breathe against like He-Man’s armor. Like the anti-anxiety jacket I velcroed around shaking terriers when I was a dog walker. Back then I zipped my hoodie to my neck. I wore Doc Martens & got muscle-skinny, riding the subway in giant headphones and licking…
“it speak(s),” a poem by Bryan Byrdlong

1. my fellow Americans we all float here, in this milleu in this atmosphere. In DIS gravity be a wishing well a penny for your thoughts and desires to come true, the American dream, but lately I’ve heard talk of an American fear. And so, we are gathered…
Poetry: Erika Luckert’s “Sonnet in case of disaster”

Put as many books as possible between you and the blast put as many bricks as possible as many walls as books between you and the blast will be big enough to breach as many bricks as this building has, its walls lined with books and those books lined with line after line will you…