Author: Heavy Feather

Four Poems by Katie Hibner

Smart Varmints You talk about how they’re smart varmints: they crawl out of a splintered helix,grow up crust-pluckingfor gratuities. They want to sic their reliquaries on ours,semantically blitzthrough our amber waves. They’re not cute and they’re not cubedbitesize;they gnaw on our breaded trade winds. You talk about howbots admit them through our firewalls,ignoring their flagrantly-laundered…
Fiction Review: Ray Barker Reads Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly

Even courageous readers have likely never encountered a character with the overwhelming physical mass and intellectual presence of (northern) Siberian oaf, and oversized tribal chief, Muzhduk Ugli the Fourth. Muzhduk is the three-hundred-pound blond-bearded protagonist that propels Alexander Boldizar’s oddly unforgettable debut novel, The Ugly, to its fairytale end. The novel ostensibly details the life…
There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, stories by Michelle Ross, reviewed by Dana Diehl

The stories in Michelle Ross’ debut collection, aptly named There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, are fueled by grade school science, by snake venom, by fossilization, by velocity, by the kind of magic that’s real. Ross’ characters live in half-formed worlds, their vision limited by their circumstances. In these twenty-three stories, characters stare down…
Five Poems by Alia Hussain Vancrown

Alif. Lām. Mīm. Morning’s glorious sclera peels night like peach skin.The casual tugging of a hangnail accentuates each hamzah. There is pain in meaningless recitation—when the bearded preacher arrives at the house before the milkman, it’s too earlyfor children to memorize sounds unable to be translated, struck into meaning from only his well-meaningbamboo discipline stick.…
Fiction: “A Texas” by Laura Ellen Scott

Bonnie & Jack Bonnie collects Jack from rehab. Fucking bougainvillea everywhere. “Thanks.” He slides into the passenger seat, tosses a half-empty duffel into the back of the white pickup and says, “Jesus.” He can’t believe it, the day, Bonnie, anything. He’s out. She can’t really bring herself to it. It’s east Texas, wet and hot.…
Fiction: Trent England’s “Patience Is the Most Passive Discipline”

The woman walking toward me is not the woman I last saw four years ago. My wife exits the airport terminal in fatigue pants and rubber sandals, her hair held back in a military bun. She wears a t-shirt with the phrase Present Without Pay written over it, and when I ask what the shirt…
Poetry Review: David Welper Reads Ben Mirov’s A Few Ideas from My Blackbox

Question: if you’re in a life-or-death situation, what would be the thoughts—no, ideas—going around in your head? Or, as Ben Mirov asks in his latest chapbook, A Few Ideas from My Blackbox, “Can you imagine a whippoorwill?” Mirov’s chapbook presents poetically ideological and existential questions in literal and figurative spaces. Each poem is short (one…
Book Review: Melih Levi Reviews Tiana Clark’s Equilibrium

Could it be magic?The white bunny we lift from the hatlike early fog on the road to work.(“Particle Fever”) To get through. To get through the day, the night. That miserable winter. Grief. All of that. To get through to you. What does it mean to get through? What does it mean, through? Does…
The Gloaming, a novel by Melanie Finn, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Good writers conjure characters from the dust and ink. Great writers can resurrect them. Melanie Finn can certainly drag a character through the gauntlet, a skill that remarkably few writers can do with the precision shown often in her most recent novel, The Gloaming. With intertwined narratives, we see the results of failure and the…