Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry & Song: “My Joyous Crown” by Nancy Christensen King & Alani Keiser

My Joyous Crown (Poem by Nancy Christensen King) Calculating and deliberateAs Flamenco dancers’ feet,You tapped and stomped upon my heartControlling every beat. Frightening, yet soothingLoyalty became,A necessary melodyMy freedom to defame. Like a raging fireLeaves no stick unburned,The marrow of my spiritTo ashen ruins turned. Until I could not bearThe weight of heavy hands,A voice…
Graphic Novel Review: Julia Mae Ftacek Reads How to Survive in the North by Luke Healy

Like the frigid plains it’s set in, Luke Healy’s graphic novel How to Survive in the North is quiet and full of introspective beauty, placing its cast of vibrant, believable characters against a looming red sky with nothing but their bodies and misty breaths, speechless in the face of their shared predicament. And the book…
Essay: “Return to Pleasantville” by Tabitha Blankenbiller

In the 1998 film Pleasantville, one of my favorites according to my college MySpace page, an alternate-universe, black-and-white TV town undergoes a metamorphosis. Led by the arrival of achingly young Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon from our world, the small world residents are introduced to the foreign concepts of sex, art, and literature—revolution by proxy,…
Two Fictions by Luke Geddes

At the Book Reading Petals of light from the disco ball lick the author’s forehead. The venue double-booked, a velvet rope is all that separates the reading from a junior high school dance. The men and women of the audience sit in folding chairs, the men on one side, the women on the other. No…
Fiction Review: James W. Davidson, Jr. Reads Stephen Dixon’s Late Stories

In Stephen Dixon’s intricate story cycle Late Stories, author and retired university teacher Phil Seidel exists alone in the Baltimore home where he and his late wife Abby raised their daughters. Though Phil exercises at the YMCA, shops at the local market, and occasionally dines at his favorite restaurants, he struggles to venture any more…
Poetry: “American Beast” by Tara Campbell

It enters on soft pawsand nuzzles your cheekand tells you it’s okay.It says it’s not your faultyour father lost his jobor is working threeor isn’t there at all. It prowls your houseand tickles your chin with Its whiskersand says it’s not your mother’s faultshe’s too tired to play with you.Mommy has to sit, It purrs,…
Poetry: Colin Dodds’ “The Again of It”

The year boils down(the temperature of boiling wateris the area code of Manhattan)to the same forms. And I fail, dramatically,to become new with the year. Outside, the token trees twinkle.I sample women’s voices, car alarms.There are miles to go before I’m drunk. The shunted New York snow testifies:I dropped from the revered skyand wound up…
Book Review: Jacob Singer on My Life as an Animal by Laurie Stone

My Life as an Animal, a collection of interconnected stories, offers a unified voice and perspective, producing the feel of a loosely constructed novel. While the stories focus on a few topics and themes—Laurie’s relationship with Richard, her family and life in New York City, and her pseudo-exile in Arizona—each topic addresses something within the…
“Abstract Grotesquism”: Daniel Miller Reviews Nathan Jurevicius’ Graphic Novel Birthmark

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Both whimsical and grotesque, Nathan Jurevicius’ latest graphic novel Birthmark is a take on an age-old story—that of the hero’s quest. The book’s cover reflects this: our hero, a tooth-like creature with tied-up hair, rides a grub through fiery-orange leaves, his eyes intently forward. The grub’s cuteness,…