Author: Heavy Feather

Pelican, a poetry collection by Emily O’Neill, reviewed by Knar Gavin

Emily O’Neill’s debut collection Pelican orbits around the loss of O’Neill’s father, yet its orbit is anything but regular. At times, the poet takes a wide arc and soars toward the outer limits of that particular loss, almost seeming to escape it altogether. Liquor, lovers (some better than others), and the moon in various phases fill…
Fiction Review: Brett Beach on Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out by Robert James Russell

L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do thing differently there.” A portion of the quote reappears as a title midway through Robert James Russell’s collection Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out—and aptly. The Michigan, Chicago, Ozarks and Ohio evoked in most of these stories, and the Midwestern narrators flung far afield…
Fiction Review: Jennifer Ray Morell Reads Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels descends into the heartbreaking abyss of loneliness, only to find connections and companionship in the most unlikely of places. Following the intertwined lives of four characters living on the cusp of society, Parry’s debut traces their narratives through New York in the mid-1890s, before the consolidation of the boroughs. Through…
The Lunatic, poems by Charles Simic, reviewed by Sarah Katz

I’d be hard-pressed to tell you that our former US Poet Laureate’s The Lunatic—so apt a title for a new collection from him that it’s almost criminal—differs thematically from his many other books. As in his other collections, the poems of The Lunatic collectively tightrope between divergent brands of madness, challenging us readers to contemplate…
Fiction Review: Nick Sweeney on Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel

Short story collections, especially those containing a multitude of stories, are difficult to gauge. How much constitutes a good or even great collection? Can one or two pieces bring all that good vibe down? Do we feel anything connecting all these pieces together? In Lincoln Michel’s debut collection, Upright Beasts, we find answers to all…
Poetry Review: AK Afferez on Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

There may be effusion in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, but there’s definitely no mawkishness, no syrupy sentimentalism. Ferociously earnest and jubilant, Ross Gay’s third collection is not simply an ode to finding gratitude for the things we usually take for granted: it is a triumphant declaration of love for the world we live in. Here,…
“To the West of Western”: Ryan Kauffman Reads Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay

Louis L’Amour once said that if a story takes place in a long-ago time west of the Mississippi River, then the story is a Western. It’s a simple definition—one that certainly helps to classify the works of big names such as Grey, Schaefer, McMurtry, and L’Amour himself—but the literary directions taken by some contemporary authors…
Fiction Review: Robert Loss Reads Don’t Start Me Talkin’ by Tom Williams

I’m sitting down in Rosie’s reading Tom Williams’ novel Don’t Start Me Talkin’, thinking about the title song and how, like so many blues songs, it’s a secret door: press on it the right way and a series of passageways opens up. Maybe you enter at the New York Dolls’ 1974 nostalgia-turned-inside-out version on Too…
“How Long Has It Been Since You Really Rocked?”: Linda Michel-Cassidy Reviews If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home by Dave Housley

Imagine a trust fall where, instead of a bundle of coworkers who you didn’t like to begin with, you drop into the arms of Metallica. Or The Ramones, or Nirvana, or even Jimmy Buffett, if that’s your jam. The players in If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home are permanently ready to…