Author: Heavy Feather
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The Loss of All Lost Things, short stories by Amina Gautier, reviewed by Erin Flanagan
Winner of the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award, Gautier’s collection The Loss of all Lost Things centers, not surprisingly, around loss. These stories are populated with characters navigating the losses accrued in their pasts and dealing with their echoing effects in the present. Gautier doesn’t waste her time on the small losses—keys, pocketbooks—but goes for…
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Poetry Review: Jackson Nieuwland on Dalton Day’s Actual Cloud
Dalton Day is a cloud with whale feelings and bones made of knives. He tells us this in the opening pages of Actual Cloud, his first book of poems. He tells us he is growing a whale in his belly. That he is filled with sand but he is not a desert. He keeps his…
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Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda Reads Gwen Beatty’s Kill Us on the Way Home
We read fiction to be who we’re not, if only for a few pages. And we don’t only do this when we read fiction. We do this, for example, when we pretend to be pregnant to befriend our Mormon ex-boyfriend’s wife. Or this is what one character does in “The Most Important Part of Being…
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“Rift: Kathy Fish & Robert Vaughan Talk About Life Through Stories”: A Review by Gay Degani
Imagine a coffee shop, something independent, unique, not part of a chain, where the air is filled with a rich, dark aroma, where the tinkle of music is subtle, underlining real conversations about real things. Now imagine a solid wooden table, highly polished by hand, scarred by time, yet warm with love. Stitting across from…
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Poetry Review: Jordan Sanderson Reviews Stranger by Adam Clay
The speaker of “Our Eternal Sounds,” a poem in the second section of Stranger, observes, “We don’t know why we speak // but yet our voices / persist.” These persistent voices serve as intermediaries between the mind and the world throughout this expansive, yet intimate collection. “Stranger” describes the world and the speaker. Throughout the…
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Fiction: Rolli’s “There’s a Swan in My Scrotum”
When I was younger my younger brother found a duck nest and picked out one egg. Then the mother bit him in the kneecaps and the rectum but her beak got stuck. He squeezed her out like he was shitting and some shit came out. Then he stomped on the nest and ran home with…
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The Fugue, a novel by Gint Aras, reviewed by Theodore Richards
One of the paradoxes of a writer’s life is that creating a novel is solitary experience that, if it is done with any degree of integrity, cannot avoid the interconnectedness of our world. We are in this together. A novel, like any work of art, is the product of the relationships of our lives. To tell…
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Book Review: Amy Long on Bible Adventures, retrogaming nonfiction by Gabe Durham
When I was about eight or nine, I swore to God that I would read my entire Precious Moments Bible. Carrying the book to church on Christmas and Easter had always made me feel like a grownup; I’d press its white-leather cover against my chest the way TV teenagers held their schoolbooks and run my…
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Fiction Review: Franklin Schneider Reads Over for Rockwell by Uzodinma Okehi
Put five writers together, and it won’t take them ten minutes to come to a consensus about why contemporary literature is so underwhelming. But read the books they’ve written and you’ll likely find that they’re guilty of every literary offense they just listed. There are many reasons for this—capitalism is one (i.e., the necessity of a marketable…
Heavy Feather Review 