Author: Heavy Feather

“Revisiting Jurassic Park”: On the Novel Adapted for Film by Sean Hooks

Michael Crichton wasn’t so much a genre writer as he was just a legitimately smart guy, a six-foot-nine-inch polymath brimming with audacity. He was a skeptic, an oracle, a Cassandra, a brand, a protean force. His November 2008 obituaries made much of the fact that he was at one point simultaneously responsible for the top-rated…
“Some Planets Are Portals”: Carolyn DeCarlo Reviews john mortara’s some planet

Picking up some planet, the reader is greeted by a series of talismans, mostly circular: a moon, a nickel, a cosmic orb, a tooth encased in dark matter, and a hand inscribed with a pyramid. These are poems by john mortara, it says. You are on some planet. john’s first full-length collection of poems, published…
“Somebody Is Watching You”: Benjamin Kinney Reviews Watchlist, an anthology edited by Bryan Hurt

Somebody is watching you. In fact, when you clicked on this article, a record of your visit to this page was made in a database somewhere. And decades from now, somebody a thousand miles away whom you’ve never met could verify that you’ve seen these words. You couldn’t have prevented it; this is the age…
The Great Medieval Yellows, poetry by Emily Wilson, reviewed by Timothy Duffy

In James Galvin’s introduction to some of Emily Wilson’s poems in the Boston Review (for a “Poet’s Sampler” section devoted to her work in 2002), he argued that Wilson’s poems “are not written for analysis, perhaps not even for approval.” He calls the poems “strenuous as the thinking they freight” and “unresolvable as their passions.”…
The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom, a new poetry collection by Noah Eli Gordon, reviewed by Alex Rieser

Noah Eli Gordon’s The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom is a text that takes up the struggle of the word itself. Kingdom weighs in at a boisterous 158 pages and is the longest of Gordon’s thus far eight poetry collections. In this text, as with anywhere else, words are all powerful, capable of defining,…
Book Review: Sarah-Jane Abate on The New York by Ben Tanzer

Ben Tanzer’s The New York Stories are both about and not about his hometown, something he references in the introduction to the collection. Tanzer renames Binghamton, New York, “Two Rivers,” a reference to the rivers that meet around the city—the Susquehanna and the Chenango. Tanzer plays with the idea of town and knowledge, the way all…
The Story of My Teeth, a novel by Valeria Luiselli, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Translations are often beautiful and alluring for myriad reasons. They offer a glimpse of a different language and structure, they are between two worlds: meaning and thought. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli and translated by Christina MacSweeney is the true definition of collaboration. It is a work of art meant to be viewed…
Book Review: AK Afferez on The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

Chika Sagawa’s life seems textbook tragic: a young woman with incredible talent in the male-dominated world of modernist literature, dead from cancer at twenty-four. But that would be a reductive portrait of her. Instead, this first comprehensive collection of Sagawa’s poems and prose—diary excerpts, notes and reviews, vignettes that read like prose poems—reveals a complex…
Two-Way Mirror, a poetry notebook by David Meltzer, reviewed by Alex Rieser

“A poet sees what you see but brings back the image in words that makes the seeing more memorable and always within reach,” Meltzer writes in a single-sentence bulleted section of Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook. Brief but in no way small, these shotgun ideas comprise the energy and spiritual structure of Meltzer’s text, a…