Author: Heavy Feather

The Future Has Poetry: Excerpts from Thresholds by Benjamin Renné

Come. Wander with me awhile among the ruins. —Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton which reminds me of a dream, our future: bills were due and I was adding up expenses on stone tablets rough chisel in one hand calculator in the other you had just come in carrying a bag of groceries, chalk full…
Flavor Town USA Nonfiction: “Jubilee” by Anne Panning

I. It was the cheapest, one-ingredient, fiercely-anticipated summer meal for a Midwestern family of six—corn on the cob. Our favorite variety: Jubilee. II. At 16, I worked the cutter belt at Big Stone Canning Factory. Every morning I biked down on my rickety ten-speed then headed in to suit up: hairnet, hardhat, orange earplugs dangling…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Dan Tremaglio’s Lyric Noir The Only Wolf Is Time

Dan Tremaglio’s The Only Wolf Is Time is a novel told through fragments. These fragments initially seem like discrete objects, pulled in from all sorts of sources—some of these scraps are graffiti tags, some are photographs of sculpture, some are dictionary definitions or screenplay dialogue. There’s a little of everything. But the beauty of Tremaglio’s…
Poetry Review: Candice Louisa Daquin Reads Courtney LeBlanc’s New Collection Her Dark Everything

Deeply personal threads shine through this collection, concerning the deaths of LeBlanc’s father and best friend—yet these narratives are not linear, but always wrapped in further messages, not strictly elegiac, but more a passing through of notes, as we see in music. Sometimes we are unable to assess the poem’s stakes, but the structure brings…
Side A Prose Poem: “Peonies” by Tiffany Troy

Peonies The chiaroscuro of my breasts hanging from my nightgown under the lamp light. His voice soothes as buds take root over my skin in droves. The buttons undone, I open the hem of the dress to my waist, as I take in the day’s sweat and decay. I detach parts of myself as he…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Stefan O. Rak’s Paranoic Novel New Roses

Paranoia is a tricky beast to capture. I think we can all recognize and relate to it from the outside easily enough, whether in the wild-eyed monologuing of Macbeth and Raskolnikov or the slow-burn panic of classic alienation thrillers like The Conversation and The Parallax View, or the countless ongoing explorations of our evolving surveillance…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s Debut Novel Then Then Then

Scott Daughtridge DeMer’s debut novel, Then Then Then, is told in fragmentary manner. Fragmentary is not quite the right word—it’s hard to describe the pieces, the moments that make up Then Then Then as fragments, because they’re something different. They are layers. DeMer has attempted to create a novel in the form of a mixed-media…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jeff Alessandrelli’s Novel about Sex & Shyness & Society And Yet

And Yet is a written record of a nameless narrator’s effort to make sense of his romantic life. He’s a young adult, busy developing a sense of self, and he sees the way his relationships affect that development. He sees that romantic relationships can foster his selfhood, and also that they can warp it. So…
“A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the Harlem Renaissance”: John Schertzer Reads Jon Woodson’s Novel The Staircase Shuffle

Jon Woodson, professor emeritus of Howard University, most notably author of To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, has of late been self-publishing both his recent scholarship as well as a few novels, collections of poetry, and translations of African writers of merit. I’m a fan of all categories of his…