Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Stephanie Marker on Emily Capettini’s Thistle: Ghosts, Memories, & Ashes

Within the language of Emily Capettini’s work, there exists a subtle sense of gentle quiet that allows the reader to sink into it, to ruminate over the delicate nature of each sentence as it works to connect one moment to the next. There is a calmness, even in anger, even in chaos, that seeps tenderly…
“It Was Getting Dark Outside but I Didn’t Want to Stop Reading to Turn the Light On”: A Short Interview with Story Prize Judge Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco holds an MFA from Brown and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipses Press, 2009), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest; judged by Rikki Ducornet), Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (which won the FC2 Catherine…
Nonfiction Review: Amy Long Reads Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox

In a recent think piece on the Vice-owned music site Noisey, music journalist Dan Ozzi asks “Is the Album Review Dead?” In it, music journalist Dan Ozzi argues that, as print media has declined in prominence and even taste-making websites like Pitchfork have lost their gatekeeper status, screaming “amateurs” on Twitter have replaced the professional…
Fiction: Randolph Pfaff’s “Day Trip with David”

Open with the narrator speaking to a statue, conveying the sadness of New Jersey. Describing the taste of ocean air outside a Walmart, the incongruity of homeless men a block off the boardwalk. It’s the end of an endless car trip in summer, credits already rolling through late afternoon sky. The statue points out the…
Poetry Review: Chris Muravez on Songs from a Mountain by Amanda Nadelberg

“Self portrait near / morning had time / to figure the intricate / rules of the sea, why / we’re here, a negation / of stars, idea without / weather or knowing / the train will stop, send / the world.”—Amanda Nadelberg, “Big Data” I was sitting on a train to Chicago, slightly hungover,…
Fiction Review: Eric Nguyen on Alexandra Naughton’s American Mary

In 2014, Sophie Katz wrote “We Don’t Have To Do Anything.” In it, Katz detailed a trip to New York as a young writer in the Alt Lit (Alternative Lit, an internet-based literary subculture that is often associated with progressive experimentalism) community and how she was sexually assaulted by an editor pseudonymously named “Stan.” Later,…
Essay: Zeke Jarvis’ “The Unintentional Dreads”

Not only do I remember the baby cats, but I remember how I heard about the baby cats. Actually, I remember that better than I remember the baby cats, which I didn’t see that much. It was the guy’s girlfriend that asked, “Don’t you think the baby cats are gross?” I stared at her until…
“They Killed Portland, You Know”: Culture Essay by Tabitha Blankenbiller

Three years ago, I met Chloe Caldwell for lunch. I was two weeks away from moving out of Oregon for my husband’s job transfer. I was reluctantly going along because that is what spouses do and what marriage is about and all that bullshit. Caldwell’s essay collection Legs Get Led Astray was a pivot point…
Phil Spotswood on Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner

Boss Fight Books, created in 2013, is a publishing house for creative nonfiction books on video games from classics like Galaga to games with a more cult following like ZZT or Super Mario Bros. 2. In the past five or so years, it seems like the gaming world and the literary world have been slowly…