Author: Heavy Feather
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Jordan Sanderson Reviews Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer, new poetry by Abraham Smith
The poems in Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer surface and ripple the tongue before diving into the depths of the primal mind, where words lose their schools, abandon their beds, and hybridize with anything that swims. Anyone who has lived in rural America will recognize the syntax of conventional wisdom, but these poems are…
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Where Alligators Sleep, flash fiction by Sheldon Lee Compton, reviewed by Steph Post
I love flash fiction. I love reading it, writing it, teaching it, sharing it. In a world where our attention spans are shrinking and our desire for something new is ever-expanding, flash fiction is a powerful way to satiate and surprise, to deliver the jolt of a story straight to the vein. I thought I…
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The Book of Joshua, poetry by Zachary Schomburg, reviewed by Bill Neumire
In Stephen Crane’s poem “In the Desert” an inexplicably naked, bestial creature squats in the desert eating its own heart “‘[b]ecause it is bitter, / [a]nd because it is [his] heart.’” The essence of Zachary Schomburg’s latest book, The Book of Joshua, calls to mind Crane’s poem with its surprising, absurd, captivating logic and dreamscape.…
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“Music of Things”: Robert Balun on Anthony McCann’s Thing Music
Anthony McCann’s Thing Music is a conversation between you and I. Thing Music is a texture, a place to hold and arrange the fragments of your life when it seems only noise. When everything is scattered, and everyone disembodied, McCann’s book is the kind of place where life can suddenly turn up in strange arrangement.…
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Bayard Godsave on If I Would Leave Myself Behind, novella + stories by Lauren Becker
The stories in Lauren Becker’s collection, brief as many of them are, operate through suggestion; they are marvels of suggestion. As a form, the short-short story must often gesture to a world that exists outside itself; sometimes this might be a world we recognize, one like the one we all inhabit; other times that world…
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CJ Opperthauser on The Self Unstable, essay/literature by Elisa Gabbert
I’ve come to believe the best kind of book is the kind of book you don’t quite know how to categorize. Such is the case with Elisa Gabbert’s newest release, The Self Unstable, which is labeled with that enticingly vague “Essay/Literature” on its back cover but which, without friction, could be called a book of…
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Keeper, poetry by Kasey Jueds, reviewed by Jacob Collins-Wilson
Jueds’ first full-length collection of poetry won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett poetry prize from University of Pittsburg Press. The poems meander through nature, mysteries of language and trying to understand it, family and art. Nature is the most prevalent topic, touching on butterflies and birds as well as mythical Selkies, half-man half-seal. Most of…
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A Tree Born Crooked, a novel by Steph Post, reviewed by Sam Slaughter
It’s time to crack out the Mountain Dew and have ourselves a party, because a new voice in Florida noir is here and, hopefully, she’s here to stay. A Tree Born Crooked, Steph Post’s debut novel, sets readers deep in the parts of Florida that tourists don’t often see—the parts where alligators are as common…
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Brett Beach on If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, a fiction chapbook by Ryan Werner
In Ryan Werner’s slim, beautiful collection, If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, twins vie for birthright order, a hollow-boned girl traces her ancestry back to birds, and at the end of the world, a man just wants to eat a caramel apple. These stories are brief but never elliptical; the past is ever…
Heavy Feather Review 