Author: Heavy Feather

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,…
Fiction: Alex Myers’ “In the Dark”

The pots simmered on the stove, and NPR babbled through their steam, cadenced voices delivering the day’s news in careful clips. James felt good, better than he had for months, better than he’d felt since Dennis had gone to his ashram or whatever. He peeled carrots, swept the spirals of skin into the trash bin,…
C.F. Lindsey Reviews Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames, a new novel by Stefan Kiesbye

“Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames have no place in children’s games.” This haunting nursery rhyme drips with dread and foreboding, and establishes the tone for Stefan Kiesbye’s novel. Set in a small German village, the book is a shining example of classic Gothic literature, but spun with a modern twist. Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames is indeed…
Two Poems by Jeremy Behreandt

Only when the last bureaucrat is hung from the entrails of the last capitalistwill we realize we cannot eat digital snow—quoted text from George Eliot’s Middlemarch in danbury, connecticut the snowdrifts snarlopinions over distances. maneki nekolifts one winter paw. bon soir papillon,bruise way in. to hope is a verbwith extension in space. to hope as…
Poetry: Terry L. Kennedy’s “Evidence of Things Unseen”

In the dream, there’s a forgotten pasture I can’t stop finding, just as, when I’m there, I can’t stop feeling at ease, at home—and isn’t that, before, what it was? Familiar clearing at the edge of the wilderness, whose centered oak created shade and, much later, lightning? As for family—Yes—and all of them—and with little…