Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Chris Liek Reads Witchita Stories by Troy James Weaver

Troy James Weaver’s collection Witchita Stories takes us back to our childhood, our hardest years, and the struggles that come along with it. These short short stories give us glimpses into the life of the narrator and his relationships with his brother and parents—and his fear of becoming just like them. Weaver revamps the coming of…
“The Final Frontier”: Fantasy, poems by Ben Fama, reviewed by Carolyn DeCarlo

Opening the envelope that contained Ben Fama’s Fantasy was an exhilarating experience. It had been raining for several days when I noticed the wet package stuck to the bottom of my mailbox. While many books have succumbed to a fate of shriveled pages, warped and discolored covers in this way, Fantasy came out of its…
“Something That Was Infinite”: Meghan Lamb Reviews The Goners, a novel by Mark Gluth

I’ve always felt a fondness toward the aesthetic of gauzy realism. It seems apt, as far as literary terms go. The term was first used by critics describing the plays of Tennessee Williams, referring to scenes which fog the real with uncanny light. Williams believed that the significance of gauzy realism was in its effect…
Scrapper, a new novel by Matt Bell, reviewed by Sam Slaughter

If they’re not from there, people tend to avoid Detroit these days. Buildings, if not collapsed, are pillaged for any valuables, and the desolate places left are filled with desperate peoples. There is a grim sense of finality in everything that happens there—the people that undertake actions could die or, if they’re lucky, move away.…
“The Uncomfortably Ugly, the Stupidly Human, and the Beauty of the Mundane”: Troy James Weaver Reviews Robert Vaughan’s Addicts & Basements

Robert Vaughan’s Addicts & Basements is a slim volume of flash fiction and poetry coming in at just under one hundred fifty pages. I’m not going to lie, that knowledge alone led me into some kind of garnered skepticism, as usually these types of collections are relegated to the I-have-all-this-shit-lying-around-might-as-well-make-a-book-of-it category. That’s not the case with…
“Prone to Marauding Poems”: An Interview with Lisa Gluskin-Stonestreet by Jane Huffman

Lisa Gluskin-Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse (Bull City Press, 2014), selected by David Baker for the Frost Place Poetry Chapbook Prize. Tulips, Water, Ash was selected by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize and published by University Press of New England in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, At Length, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 Poems, Quarterly…
“One Time I Met a Swaggering Expat in a Japanese Convenience Store Who Gave Me a Lecture on His Theory of Novels”: An Interview with Tote Hughes by David Rawson

In reading Tote Hughes’ novella Fountain (Miami University Press), I was taken by the quirky, beautiful timelessness of the prose and characters. As Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies, has said, “Tote Hughes’ Fountain is one of the strangest books I’ve come across in years, and I mean that as an…
Poetry Review: Brian Alan Ellis on Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

Noah Cicero had a nervous breakdown. Following an Adderall bender and the unraveling of a cross-continental romance, the angry young man who authored critically acclaimed existentialistic novels like The Human War, Bad Behavior, and The Insurgent, completely and nervously broke down. Then he got himself together. Bipolar Cowboy, this collection of confessional poems and poem-like…
Get in Trouble, stories by Kelly Link, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

Kelly Link’s fiction follows the same kind of logic that lets you coast through a dream where your partner is played by your tenth-grade math teacher and you’re wearing roller skates, yet there doesn’t seem anything weird about it. In Link’s stories, mermaids are an invasive species, the job of superhero sidekick includes a lot…