Author: Heavy Feather

“The Dilettante Magpie’s Guide to Research”: Natalie Louise Tombasco in Conversation with Poet Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press), and the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared…
Short Story for Haunted Passages: “I Cut Her Out of Me” by D. Avern

The panel buildings, painted in all the colors of the rainbow, stood impassively amidst the oak forest. They soared several hundred meters high, as if trying to reach the clouds with their rooftops, equipped with helicopter landing pads—clouds shimmering with every hue of a watercolor palette, diluted in warm water and poured into the clear…
“Quotation Marks Are for Amateurs”: Matthew Kinlin in Conversation with James Nulick

From the venom-tongued Valencia to the hallucinatory The Moon Down to Earth, James Nulick writes novels about outsiders with the precision of a plastic surgeon and the phantasmagorial style of Marcel Proust reanimated in battery acid. His hypnotic and serpentine prose cumulates and reaches new heights in his latest novel Plastic Soul, a work of…
Poetry Review: Casper Orr Reads Bianca Rae Messinger’s Debut Collection pleasureis amiracle

Bianca Rae Messinger’s first full-length collection, pleasureis amiracle, explores the timelessness of memory and desire. While reading Messinger’s lyrical prose, I oftentimes found myself reading the poems aloud, nearly singing them. The musical quality of the poetry in pleasureis amiracle begs you and I to question the importance of sound in our lives. What does…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Nathan Dixon’s Story Collection Radical Red

I came to this book looking for right-wing horror. I wanted to giggle at the thing that freaks me out, instead of turning squeamishly away. Nathan Dixon has made up a cast of characters who recur from short story to short story in this collection. Some of them could probably be identified with real figures…
Poetry Review: Andrew Rihn Reads Declan Ryan’s Collection Crisis Actor

In Rocky II, Adrian is pregnant and while moving a heavy can of dog food at the pet shop, she over-exerts herself and ends up slipping into a coma. Rocky is understandably beside himself. Waiting beside Adrian’s hospital bed, when Rocky was at his most vulnerable and needing to steel himself, he didn’t go to…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Peter Valente’s Artaud Occult Belief Guide Obliteration of the World

The third number of La Révolution surréaliste, appearing in April 1925, was remarkable for its inclusion of strident statements addressed to the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Buddhist Schools. Largely responsible for these items, as well as for overseeing the issue, was Antonin Artaud, (1896-1948), a recent addition to the Paris Surrealist group. In…
Bad Survivalist: Four Falling Sonnets by Eugene Ostashevsky

VI. Having children is exploitative. Children may become more than children. Those who have more children before the war, may have fewer after the war. Let us chide both children and the having of children. Having children is expletive. Children may cause lasting damage. To themselves, to everyone around them. They are just not safe.…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads duncan b. barlow’s Story Collection Awry

There’s a wolf on the cover of duncan b. barlow’s Awry, stylized in red and black, a signpost that seems to signal a collection of nightmarish short stories, some, presumably, centered on the image of the wolf, all, presumably, dark and bloody. This cover is a misdirection of sorts. There are animals scattered through Awry,…