Author: Heavy Feather

The Mad Feast, an ecstatic food tour by Matthew Gavin Frank, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Let me just say at the outset that The Mad Feast is a frenzied, delirious ride of a book. This collection of fifty essays travels around the country, through Matthew Gavin Frank’s mind, and into the nether regions of America’s culinary heritage. It’s an exploration of pleasure and sexuality, food and loss, slavery and cannibalism,…
Poetry Review: Sandra Hunter Reads Antidote for Night by Marsha de la O

Poetry is no easy way to understand why we are here on this planet; . . . A poet achieves the essential on the page, for a moment, and then that moment is gone. —Ilya Kaminsky: A Conversation, with Tatyana Mishel, Cranky Literary Journal As a UK transplant, I’ve lived in California since…
Two Poems by Brian Beatty

Coyote Coyote—for Tony Fitzpatrick That forest that goesunseen for its own trees is full of mirrors, too: obscure, obsceneAmerican mirrors baring our teeth. We like whatever we notice oncewe dare to re-open our eyes. But those dark unknowns we still fearrun wild through our veins. And in the proud American waybullets whiz by our heads.…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda Reads Softby Ryan Werner

There’s not much to writing rock and roll music. A popular quote says all you need is three chords and the truth. Researching this quote, I learned that it was about country music (from Harlan Howard), but it applies to rock and roll, too. In fact, Lou Reed said one chord was fine, and two…
“Stealing Breath”: An Interview with Bryn Chancellor by Erin Flanagan

Bryn Chancellor’s collection When Are You Coming Home? won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She has received the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction, literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission…
Two Poems from This Is the Way to Rule: Joshua Young

Dear Survivors, we come upon a party of women cutting through the gut of a forest. when they see us approaching, they scatter. we keep shouting, we mean no harm, but just as quickly as we came upon them, they’ve vanished. we can hear breaths and twigs snapping, but cannot see them. our shouts keep…
The Spectators, a new graphic novel by Victor Hussenot, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. 1. Victor Hussenot’s newest graphic novel, The Spectators, is his first published in English, and, well, it isn’t really a graphic novel at all. Or, it is and it isn’t. It is. (A note to my wife: this isn’t another opinion piece on misnomers and the politics…
“Moving Beyond Humanness”: An Interview with Carol Guess & Kelly Magee by Dana Diehl

A girl sheds jellyfish from her skin. A man grows a Joey in his artificial womb. One woman buzzes with locusts, while another carries a sparrow in her chest. A bank teller adopts a baby hippo he finds in a baby hatch. A man’s girlfriend gives birth to a live school of fish. In their…
Fiction: Lori D’Angelo’s “Neighbors”

Thomas hired a neighbor woman to spy on his wife. He told himself that it was for his wife’s own good. His marriage had fizzled, and he wanted to know why. His wife’s name was Donna. The neighbor’s name was Donnetta. At times, he felt like he wasn’t even spying. The neighbor was like an…