Author: Heavy Feather

How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, a story collection by Kate Bernheimer, reviewed by Allegra Hyde

In the title story of Kate Bernheimer’s latest collection, How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, we encounter a universe where dolls talk and little girls receive trays of lollipops and jelly beans as nighttime snacks. A universe, it would seem, of childhood fantasy. And yet, as with the other stories in the…
Contributors’ Corner: Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Cynthia Marie Hoffman, whose four prose poems appear in 3.2. Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, and the forthcoming…
Mira Corpora, a novel by Jeff Jackson, reviewed by Kyle Coma-Thompson

“These days I’m on a need-to-know basis with myself.” Two-thirds of the way into Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora, the novel’s narrator makes this brief, rare admission of self-awareness. It could also serve as a statement of purpose and description of a method. Reading like the remains of a novel, the leftovers of a trauma narrative…
Kimonos in the Closet, poems by David Shumate, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

Organized in thematic clusters, the poems in David Shumate’s Kimonos in the Closet are poems of exchange—cultural, historical, mythological, and personal. Shumate has long occupied a prominent place in the world of prose poetry, but his prose poems ring differently from those of other practitioners of the form. They do not often systematically derange the…
The Fatherlands, prose poems by Michael Trocchia, reviewed by Nick Kocz

I thought often of the surrealist painters of the last century—specifically, Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico—while reading The Fatherlands, Michael Trocchia’s brooding chapbook of thirty-three Roman-numbered prose poems. The opening piece, with its evocation of “a time when the hours themselves will be melted down for the glass of transparent death” brings to mind…
“The Inexhaustible Variety of the Human Body Is Beautiful”: A Conversation with Luca Dipierro by Zach Mueller

*Ed.’s Note: click on images to view larger sizes. An introduction to Italian-American visual artist Luca Dipierro’s work becomes unfinished the moment it’s written. Luca is less a visual artist than he is an invisible city planner, a tactile architect who uses pencil, paint, fabric, wood, tree bark, buttons, cotton, old book covers—anything and everything…
Contributors’ Corner: John M. Gist

Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from John M. Gist, whose story “Intuition” appears in 2.2. John M. Gist’s creative nonfiction and short stories have appeared in publications such as the The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Superstition Review, Pithead Chapel,…
“Authenticity and Alienation”: Dennis B. Ledden on Jim Daniels’ Birth Marks

Although the title of this new superb collection by Jim Daniels, the award-winning author of thirteen previous books of poetry, may very well be a reference to the poems themselves, we may also speculate that his title refers to the nature of his experiences while growing up in 1960s/70s Detroit and to the alienation that…
Kelsie Hahn Reviews Twilight of the Wolves, a novel by edward j rathke

edward j rathke’s novel Twilight of the Wolves opens with a boy digging graves. He is alone. Everyone he knows is dead, consumed by a war that will engulf cities, peoples, a continent. It has already consumed his heart. Or so it appears: By the first nightfall, he no longer cried. By morning his lips…