Author: Heavy Feather

Nonfiction Review: VHS & Why It’s Hard to Live by Tatiana Ryckman

Memory is built from pieces of itself: perfect enough at best, like a glued-together mirror or you or me. This makes the fragmentary personal essays of Tatiana Ryckman’s VHS & Why It’s Hard to Live both a curious and not-so-curious delivery of memoir. The short bursts of recall accurately transcribe the way our minds work,…
Natural Wonders, a novel by Angela Woodward, reviewed by Katie M. Flynn

Benjy, first slide, please. So begins Angela Woodward’s innovative and allegorical novel about, well, everything. We find ourselves in a lecture hall at some point in the twentieth century. The instructor, known only as Jonathan, whose specialty is “jaw measurement,” is giving a slideshow presentation for his introductory course on the earth and its prehistory…
“This, being absorbed”: Alicia Wright on Gale Marie Thompson’s New Poetry Collection Soldier On

“I only wanted for to see / the spectral light,” writes Gale Marie Thompson in her first collection of glistening poetry, Soldier On. Yet it is not as much the idea of light that governs this collection, more the gesture of “hand[ing] each other daffodils in the dark,” that speaks to the sort of intimate…
John Brown Spiers on Cynan Jones’ Novel Everything I Found on the Beach

It is possible to say that Everything I Found on the Beach is a novel of rabbits. They enter, innocuously enough, as food; the restaurant manager of a seaside hotel asks Hold, his fishmonger, if he can hunt down a dozen or so for the kitchen. Before the hunt, Hold tries to convince the mother…
Poetry: M.G. Martin’s “over & over until again”

it’s not that you get better, worse, or stay the same, but that you are all of the above. you are greater than the sum & are all of the parts. the worst part of your you is me & i will bite the words “i love you” until my teeth abandon my gums. creeley…
Fiction Review: Eric Andrew Newman on Battle Rattle by Brandon Davis Jennings

What Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is to Operation Desert Storm, Brandon Davis Jennings’ Battle Rattle is to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Both books are a meditation on the experience of what it’s like to live through the thick smoke of war, while at the same time contemplating the disconnected alienness of returning to a home you no…
Two Poems by Joshua Kleinberg

The Gray—for Frank O’Hara This house is dark like an antique movie.You forget there’s wood underneathuntil the paint begins chipping away,you forget how everything’s just earth.The music drifts in from another room,sleepy and solemn and glazed-eyedand there is the wind, whispering at me,something too ripe with doom to recite.In Texas, they say no one ever…
Review: Erin Flanagan on Sara Majka’s Story Collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In

From the very start of Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Majka plunks the reader into a world where opposites coexist: coming and going, marriage and divorce, the past and the present. She prepares us to have our expectations upset, to see the contradictions our lives bear and how our worlds can hold disparate concepts—love and…
Daughters of Monsters, stories by by Melissa Goodrich, reviewed by Trent Chabot

At first glance, the absurdism that permeates the stories in Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich is what jumps off the page at the reader. Goodrich opens the collection with “she wants, she gets,” a unique twist on the known fairy tale of Cinderella: the narrator continually morphs into different animals as the story progresses,…