Author: Heavy Feather

  • Book Review: Sarah Katz on The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, a poetry collection by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

    Book Review: Sarah Katz on The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, a poetry collection by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

    The forty-two poems in Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s latest poetry collection, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, are an enchanting epistemic study of the interaction between character perspective and language. Each poem, a “triptych” of three stanzas depicting three unusual characters—an old woman full of memories, a sultry tulip wearing an “upturned skirt,” and…

  • The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013, edited by Daniel Lawless, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013, edited by Daniel Lawless, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    When I was a child, I would spend hours gazing into my View-Master, clicking through image after image and then clicking through them again. Each image seemed to transport me to this other world, where the landscapes and characters were distinct but unified by a certain slant of light. I wanted to stay in that…

  • Instructions for the Orgy, a poetry chapbook by Jeffrey Hecker, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    Instructions for the Orgy, a poetry chapbook by Jeffrey Hecker, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    Jeffrey Hecker’s Instructions for the Orgy begins with the preparation of “the loving space.” “Delouse” it, the speaker tells the “first to the orgy.” This is the first of many directives to the roughly ten people (one guy gets locked in a woodshed and there’s a “line of braided Wiccan women,” whose accompaniment of Reed…

  • Leaving the Pink House, a memoir by Ladette Randolph, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

    Leaving the Pink House, a memoir by Ladette Randolph, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

    Ladette Randolph’s memoir tells of how she and her husband purchase a Nebraska farmhouse the day after 9/11 and spend the next eleven months renovating against the ticking clock of a bridge loan. It would be too pat to say they’re building their dream house; Randolph already lives in a home she loves. Instead this…

  • Like a Woman, a novel by Debra Busman, reviewed by John Vanderslice

    Like a Woman, a novel by Debra Busman, reviewed by John Vanderslice

    The horror stories of kids, especially lesbian and gay kids, forced into the world of prostitution, with its coincident realms of drug abuse and violent assault, never get less horrific or heartbreaking. Debra Busman, who co-directs the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University at Monterey Bay, and whose profound sense of…

  • Poetry Review: CJ Opperthauser on ECODEVIANCE, a how-to guide by CAConrad

    Poetry Review: CJ Opperthauser on ECODEVIANCE, a how-to guide by CAConrad

    CAConrad’s latest book serves as a how-to guide—through (Soma)tic rituals, we see the prompt and the resulting poems, pulling the curtain on the revered role of poet. The reader’s invited to perform the same writing exercises, however deep they may be in crystal-fused ritual, and in turn the identity of the writer is opened up…

  • Excavation, a memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz, reviewed by Cameron Contois

    Excavation, a memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz, reviewed by Cameron Contois

    In fall of 2008, a scandal rocked my small town, Marquette, in Upper Michigan. Displayed across the cover of the local newspaper was the face of a teacher accused of sexual misconduct stemming from alleged sexual encounters with underage girls in the Nineties, while I had attended Marquette Senior High School. The male teacher later…

  • Rain of the Future, new poetry by Valerie Mejer, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    Rain of the Future, new poetry by Valerie Mejer, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

    The poems in Valerie Mejer’s Rain of the Future are mesmerizing and irresistible, and the translations are first-rate. Mejer delivers a world that is at once familiar and strange, and even before arriving at the series of poems titled “Uncanny,” Freud’s concept of the same name comes to mind. The poems are intimate and immediate,…

  • Lamentation, a crime novel by Joe Clifford, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

    Lamentation, a crime novel by Joe Clifford, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

    It’s relatively easy to find a crime narrative that’s gritty. However, finding one in which the grittiness intensifies once it stops dealing with guns, drugs, and violence and crosses into the realm of emotions is much harder. Joe Clifford’s Lamentation does exactly that. Clifford takes the broken life of a junkie, big economic interests, a…