Author: Heavy Feather

Two Poems by J. Bradley

Enrolling in the Human League I’m writing you the perfect love song:the beat a gasp from Lloyd Dobblerwhile his stomach collapsesaround my right fist, the lyricscut from your favorite magazines,glued onto construction paperthat matches your eyes. I’ll shave and dress so well,my floor will wear your clothesperfectly. You’ll rememberthe tune, ignore our words. I’m a…
The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, a novel by Leland Cheuk, reviewed by Ben Duax

The Asian American experience is a history of erasure. Generations of Asians in America have been forced to deal with attempts to define them as uniquely other, from the Angell treaty of 1880, which limited ships arriving in America to no more than fifteen Chinese, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war.…
“The Whole World Around You Is Sort of Decomposing”: An Interview with Stefan Kiesbye by Robyn Ringler

Stefan Kiesbye and I first met at the University of Tampa, where I was a student in the low-residency MFA program. Stefan was a faculty member. While he was not my direct mentor, he taught many classes and workshops, and generously shared his views on fiction with me and other students. I felt I knew…
Poetry: Peter Schwartz’s “a dozen parables”

1.there once was a farmer who always saw the sunrise, he died in a weird experiment with mosquitoes and bees. 2.once was a pilot with nowhere to go who invented chess. 3.once was a student who coveted manhood, he developed a new way of looking at time and space but was completely penniless in the…
Nonfiction Review: Vivian Wagner on Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, a memoir by Lori Jakiela

Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe tells the story, on one level, of Lori Jakiela’s search for her birth mother. She encounters more than she expects in this search, however, and the story ends up being as much a self-exploration as it is a search for someone outside of herself. It’s a complicated,…
Fiction Review: Mika Kennedy on The Farmacist by Ashley Farmer

The digital is often framed as a site of contagion—one can contract fatal viruses (or send them). One can suffer the pollution of good ol’ American values—the allure of exotic chrome and pixels from the Silicon Valley proving altogether too enticing. Indeed, the Valley itself was once good ol’ American farmland, before wresting technological eminence…
Poetry: Three Boundary Critiques by Andrew Rihn

I. Convergent Boundaries The Himalayan mountain range formedwhen two tectonic plates converged,their equal densities raising them uplike a sacrifice to the gods.Rick met Ilsa in Paris, a monthbefore Paris met the Germans.Convergence like this reversesour faults. We finish one another’ssentences. They drank from each other’sglasses at La Belle Aurore.She wore blue, the Germans wore grey.Convergence…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda on Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France by Bryan Hurt

Not too long ago, I read of a city in France that installed short story dispensers, a reason to travel to the country even if one is not, say, the ambassador to the country, a career I had not considered before reading Bryan Hurt’s debut collection. Thankfully, readers do not have to use a short…
“A Cloudy Morality Tale”: Benjamin Kinney Reviews Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor

Dating back to the old saying “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you,” there is an understanding in our society that performing good deeds is a lucrative venture. Only recently have authors and artists begun to unpack the logic of this statement: if we perform good deeds for others with the…