Author: Heavy Feather

“The Old Reactor Keeps Chugging”: A Reflection on the Writings of David Ohle by Daniel J. Cecil

1. Throughout his entire life, my grandfather has worked and lived as a farmer. Years of shuffling feet, skinny legs pressed to the back of tobacco and dirt stained overalls, he bouncing along in the seat of a green John Deere before a slow, meditating descent into his favorite rocking chair in which he sat,…
“Remote, Desolate, and Hard to Survive”: An Interview with Iver Arnegard by Linda Michel-Cassidy

In his collection Whip & Spur, Iver Arnegard writes wildness and isolation—the desert mesa, winter in Montana, the middle-of-nowhereness of North Dakota—places where making it to tomorrow is a daily occupation. For those who may be conjuring ideas of bucolic streams and lazy bunny-filled vistas—these are not those stories. Instead of romanticizing the rural, Arnegard…
Poetry Review: Ally Harris on Contraband of Hoopoe by Ewa Chrusciel

In the title of Ewa Chrusciel’s new book of poetry is the word “contraband,” objects or ideas that are forbidden but desired. Hunks of cheese and obscure meats. Silk dresses, fine vases, a book, an ideology. To smuggle: the transportation of one thing to another space, particles that move but don’t disappear. Contraband of Hoopoe and…
“Of an (Afraid-of-Disappearing) American Learning to Swim”: Michael Martrich on Reading Emily Kiernan’s Great Divide

Water often symbolizes freedom from the structures that bind us; it floods, blurs, sweeps, and/or removes us from the gridded patterns and routines (the everyday) of place, language, tradition, relationships, bureaucracies, hierarchies, and our taken-for-granted constructions of realities in which we put much or all of our faith. The ocean, in particular, symbolizes vagueness and…
Louise Henrich Reads The Empty House, stories by Nathan Oates

Imagine The Empty House as a passport, and each story as a fresh stamp. But this collection allows the reader to do more than travel—it forces them to face who they are as a traveler. Do they exploit, patronize and appropriate, or do they participate in a meaningful and mutually beneficial exchange? The stories take…
“Beyond the Scorpions’ Violins”: Jared Smith Reads John Amen’s strange theater

In strange theater, John Amen has written a remarkable, if emotionally difficult book of poetry that plumbs the dark nature and forces of humanity, set against our intellectual striving for human dignity and meaning in a technological age. Cloaked in the style and language of Albee and the theater of the absurd, from which this…
“The Power of Kayfabe”: An Interview with Box Brown by Dan Mancilla

The accolades continue to pile up for artist and graphic novelist Box Brown. Aside from his Ignaz Award, his publishing house, Retrofit Comics, continues to put out quality independent graphic art. And aside from all that, of course, Brown’s labor of love, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend (First Second Books, 2014), spent three weeks on…
“Virtuosic Metaphors, Verbing Nouns, and Kaleidoscoping Adjectives”: An Interview with Lee Ann Roripaugh by Jillian M. Phillips

When you come across a poetry collection with a word you’re not familiar with as the title, and a picture of some sort of cocooned humanoid on the sun-yellow cover, you’re bound to be intrigued. Buy that book. That book is Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fourth collection, Dandarians (Milkweed Editions, 2014), and is as mysterious and…
Almost Famous Women, short stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

In her second story collection, Almost Famous Women, Megan Mayhew Bergman delves into the lives of real women who skirted the fringes of fame, feminism, femininity, and polite society, looking at the ripple effects of both the choices they made and the ones that were made for them. Conjoined twins, a self-destructive painter, the illegitimate…