Author: Heavy Feather

Review: Nick Sweeney on Of This New World by Allegra Hyde

All writers want to create new worlds. Good writers want to explore new worlds. Great writers want to expose new worlds. In Of This New World, the readers are exposed to twelve beautiful worlds and the inhabitants who survive in them. Allegra Hyde has her fingers on the pulse of today and the particular patterns…
“How a Shark Encouraged Blake Lively to Finish Medical School,” a Haunted Passages essay about grief by Tasha Coryell

Someone is dead or someone is dying before the shark even arrives. Sharks can smell blood in the water, even if this blood is only a metaphor. In The Shallows, the shark has ostensibly been attracted to the beach by the floating whale carcass. In actuality, the shark was attracted by Nancy Adams’ grief. I…
Book Review: Paul Albano on Julian Tepper’s New Novel Ark

Julian Tepper’s second novel, Ark, chronicles a once wealthy, currently inept, New York family, the (sort of) titular Arkins, on their strange, funny, and fraught slide down the socioeconomic ladder, undone by greed, bad luck, and a vexing proclivity for suing each other. Ark is a primarily New York-set novel—not the Gershwin-scored New York of…
Two Poems by Parker Tettleton

I’m Somewhere Has An Apostrophe It’s honest to feel anything but. I’m older every day, younger every year. There’s beer in our mouths and smiles are pilgrim as fuck. It’s midnight when I can look my teeth in the mirror. Hands In Lapse I smoke in the shower, someones in my sleep I drink. That’s…
Poetry Review: Katie Hibner Reads Crystal Curry’s But I Have Realized It

The genre of bildungsroman, since it literally translates from the Latin into “education novel,” is, by definition, limited to narrative prose. If Anne Carson chips at that barrier with her verse novel Autobiography of Red, Crystal Curry shatters it with the surreal lyricism of her coming-of-age collection, But I Have Realized It. Curry asserts the…
“An Undertow to Struggle Against”: Anne Valente in Conversation with Dustin M. Hoffman

Dustin M. Hoffman’s debut short story collection, One Hundred-Knuckled Fist, is filled with the voices of workers and the environments of workplaces: what so often goes unnoticed in fiction, as if how we spend so much of our day must remain invisible in literature. Instead of viewing work as only one small token of characterization,…
Three Poems by David Brennan

Robert Frost, OMG, above me is the moon and Mars and scalloped dictionariesof cloud falling open to the page obsoletelives on. Like a Jazzercise class with one studentand a militant instructor, that’s how the moonmakes Mars work its lower abs. And the coldis gorgeous and tender, like you, and meanand abrasive, like you, and you…
Fiction Review: Greg Marzullo Reads Troy James Weaver’s Marigold

For the depressive, a bouquet of blooming roses is more for funeral arrangements than Valentine’s Day, and every moment is a gateway to a bleak eternity. Troy James Weaver evocatively captures the sense of otherness lingering on the borderlands between life and death in Marigold, an impressionistic chronicle of a florist’s suicidal ideation. As if…
Graphic Novel Review: Karl Schroeder Reads Ricardo Cavolo & Scott McClanahan’s The Incantations of Daniel Johnston

In Daniel Johnston’s early years in Texas, when he was just beginning to find an audience, in order to give someone a copy of his album, he’d have to run back home and record the whole thing over again, from start to finish, in a single take. Aside from illustrating his technical limitations, this detail…