Author: Heavy Feather

Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
Poetry from the Future: “The Uncertainty Ballade” by Daniel Brennan

And of these rivers which curve as all rivers curve the way a scythe claims wheat there the gun’s warm tongue in your hands admire how these hands spread with worship like a greasy and over-thumbed takeout menu no this is not my native violence never the ease of inheritance the violets they are mid-bloom…
Side A Poetry: “It Might as Well Be” by Max Winter

It Might as Well Be Which is a stateIf the weather holdsAnd the wind arrives timelyIf it’s right it’s easyAs being hit by a carOr scooped from a litterHappiness for everybodyAnd a carbonated lime drinkWith a talking sailboatFinishing my sentencesAt moments you think for meLittle boatLittle squireI bequeath you everythingBut we’re not thereYet are weI…
“Spirit Rock”: Matthew Sidney Parsons Talks with Wes Blake about His Book Pineville Trace

Wes Blake lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, and is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize. Pineville Trace follows Frank Russet, as he sets off on a quest following a cat named Buffalo. After Frank escapes from a prison in Kentucky, his journey to find meaning in the absence of his…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Brendan Gillen’s Debut Novel Static

Brendan Gillen’s debut novel follows a trio of musicians trying to survive in New York City. Static explores the sacrifices artists make, the realities of who makes it big and who doesn’t, and the messy but sometimes magical process of collaborative creation. The novel is told from the point of view of Paul, who is…
Poetry Review: Jordan Hamel Reads Michael Chang’s Collection Toy Soldiers

The term “Gruen Transfer,” named after some dead Austrian architect, defines the state of idealized hyperreality realized by deliberate reconstruction of a person’s surroundings. Every time you take that first step into a giant mall, there’s a small moment; a moment of disorientation and confusion as you survey the chaos of new surroundings, a moment when…
Bad Survivalist: “And Our Flag Was Still There,” a short comic by Jesse Bradley-Amore

Jesse Bradley-Amore is a writer, cartoonist, and (occasional) improviser based out of Winter Park, Florida. His stories have been featured on RISK! and The Volume Knob. His comics have been published in Oyez Review and Action, Spectacle. Under his J. Bradley pen name, he’s the author of Teenage Wasteland: An American Love Story and has fiction in Short Edition dispensers. He’s…
Bad Survivalist Poem by Frances Mac: “What we lost”

was our car and supplies for a Girl Scoutsurvival—protein bars, extra underwear, a beliefin fossil fuels. It was not like the movies.You cannot whisper or roundhouse kickan entrance to test for danger. They don’t waituntil you’ve tiptoed inside to take a jugular.We scattered like buckshot when the firstscream sliced the air like a mandolin. You…