Author: Heavy Feather
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Talkativeness, poetry by Michael Earl Craig, reviewed by Kyle Harvey
There is a disorienting, though familiar, quality to Talkativeness, the new collection of poems by Michael Earl Craig. I’m ashamed to admit that, although I have run across his poems in journals, I had never spent any real time with Craig’s work. Perhaps this is why reading the first half of this collection felt a…
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“I Think We Recognize Ourselves in the Flawed”: An Interview with Charles Dodd White by Linda Michel-Cassidy
A Shelter of Others, by Charles Dodd White (Fiddleback ltd), is set near the southern border of North Carolina, in a rugged holler punctuated by alcohol abuse, drug trade and brutish policemen. While the extremes to which these characters are pushed nears the surreal, White never allows them to become the other. By the time…
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Understudies, a short novel by Ravi Mangla, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler
In Ravi Mangla’s Understudies the unnamed, first-person narrator, a high school teacher, helps his mother overcome her fear of flying, chills with a neighbor obsessed with a female movie star who’s moved into the neighborhood, and learns he’s about to be a father. He speaks in episodic vignettes about his job, his friends, his live-in…
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Contributors’ Corner: Nathan Blake
Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Nathan Blake, whose story “When Us Men Tell” appears in 3.1. Nathan Blake’s first chapbook, Going Home Nowhere Fast, is available from Winged City Chapbook Press, and you can find some…
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Made to Break, a novel by D. Foy, reviewed by James R. Gapinski
Foy’s Made to Break follows a group of friends on vacation. They are staying at a cabin in the woods. And like any good cabin in the woods, it becomes more perilous with every page. Readers are treated to storms, mudslides, car wrecks, grave illness, and injury. On top of that, factor in a cryptic…
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The Sea-God’s Herb, literary criticism by John Domini, reviewed by Nichole L. Reber
College lit crit courses. Perhaps that’s the best purpose for John Domini’s The Sea-God’s Herb. His compendium of essays and criticism from 1975 through this year is a rather heavy-handed version of literary (and other) criticism and reminds me of a great deal of material read in my grad school writing classes—in other words, it…
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“On RoboCop”: A Digressive and Somewhat Personal Essay on Beauty, Poetics, and Aesthetics by Sampson Starkweather
The 2011 Kickstarter video to build Detroit a giant statue of RoboCop is, despite what anyone may tell you, one of humanity’s and art’s greatest achievements. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imaginationstation/detroit-needs-a-statue-of-robocop The video is a ten minute rap in a British accent which maps out via mad verbal flow the plot of RoboCop from beginning to end, with sound…
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“Reading Carl Dimitri’s Paintings”: An Art Essay by Evelyn Hampton
Dear reader, this essay is organized into sections; each section is titled after the series of paintings it talks about. All of the paintings referred to below can be seen here. * PORTALS The paintings in this series are made of openings in color and line. I think of the fistulas that form in the…
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Contributors’ Corner: Tim Kahl
Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Tim Kahl, whose poems “The Patron Saint of All Lost Causes” and “Starring: A Town at War” appear in 3.1. Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009) and The Century…
Heavy Feather Review 