Author: Heavy Feather

Review: Erin Flanagan on Amy Gustine’s Story Collection You Should Pity Us Instead

Amy Gustine’s first collection of stories demonstrates a remarkable range, not only in situation and character, but also in the vast landscapes of human emotion and reaction. The characters surprise the reader with what they’re willing to do, but they also surprise themselves. In the opening story “All the Sons of Cain,” a mother goes…
Fiction Review: Gay Degani on Peek by Paul Beckman

Picture a seven-year-old with a magnifying glass and a battalion of ants trooping along the sidewalk with contraband. The sun blazes down, a strong summer sun. Some of the ants burn up, some escape and immediately have regrets, while others stream off into lush grass, but all have exposed their essential tiny ant souls. Paul…
“Someday I’m Going to Die”: Daniel Miller Reviews New Animals by Nick Francis Potter

New Animals is comics. It is short stories. It is the dreams and nightmares of various horned creatures, of children, and of angels. As its name suggests, New Animals is a living, breathing creature, each short piece another row of razor-sharp teeth. On the book’s backside, author Lily Hoang has this to say about Nick…
Two Poems by Mark DeCarteret

Deluge After one day of rainwe could feel in our ankleswhere the nails had been sunkand we knew that His bloodwould somehow fail us. After two days of rainthe children sang of the pavementthey’d once chalked their own halos on—when their tongues weren’t swollenwith the names of those who’dthey stuck them out at with blame.…
Review: Annalia Luna on Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary

When it comes to writing, Asian women in America are given two choices. The first, of course, is the one where her exoticism oozes from her skin like bark slathered in sap, where she is delicate like dishes that only see food during holidays. She is an Asian woman with Asian parents who adore her…
Staying Alive, poetry by Laura Sims, reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland

As soon as I read the description of this book on the Ugly Duckling Presse website, I knew I had to have it: In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during, and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of…
Fiction: Robert Duncan Gray’s “Helen”

Helen is dead. We used to have sex. We had three types of sex. The type of sex we had most often was mediocre sex. The type of sex we had second most often was bad sex. The type of sex we had very rarely was good sex. When we had good sex, it was…
Gods in Neon, stories by Sam Slaughter, reviewed by Greg Marzullo

An adult son abandons his paralyzed father for a splash of Old Crow. A young widower, self-medicating with a stream of drinks, crafts macabre stuffed rabbits for his autistic son. A businessman goes to Key West for a work meeting and, after a wave of several cocktails, tastes the wondrous and insane glory of his…
Fiction Review: Mike McClelland Reads Matthew Binder’s High in the Streets

Matthew Binder’s debut novel, High in the Streets, is a risky novel, containing many of the elements that most writers are told to (and, it must be said, probably should) avoid. Writing about writing? It’s here in abundance. Shrill, oversexualized female characters? Check! An aimless man-child for a protagonist? Yep. It takes great talent and…