Author: Heavy Feather

“Transformations in Unknowable Ways”: John Schertzer Reads John Madera’s Story Collection Nervosities

Nervosities, John Madera’s distinctive and expansive new story collection, may be categorized as postmodern, since much of its reflexive concerns and critique align with post-1968 French philosophical questions, albeit without the pomo fizz and jizz of the 1990s pop-speculative agon. The stories also betray a deep proclivity for the best of Modernism, e.g., formal and…
Fiction from the Future: “Professor & I” by Mukul

Outside, at dawn, this is same dew that was once a cloud, once a river, once a pond, once a ray of the sun, once a dust of the stars, and who knows maybe once a syllable of the Word. These ornaments of nature, ornaments of language, an exercise in style and sound and sight…
Side A Poem: “Prodigal” by Michael Juliani

Prodigal My phone rings all hoursof the night with my grandmother wanting her mother, her sister,her husband, anyone dead who still walks the housein her mind. I repeat a script my mother taught meto soothe her back to sleep, then try it on myself,ears open to the screech owls and red-crowned parrotscommingled in the blue…
Side A: Two Poems by Wes Civilz

Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues ● The stunning fact of shame’s preeminence In all I say and do and make and think ● Blue gloomy penis: an impediment ● The lazy way I use my blood as ink ● Eating my food so fast I hate myself ● Wolfing down burgers easily, I’m busily Constructing…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Vi Khi Nao’s Novel The Italy Letters

The epistolary form has been standard in literary fiction more or less since its inception. We’ve seen it done well and originally in authors like Ovid and Samuel Richardson, cleverly reimagined by folks like Mariama Ba, Julie Schumacher, Roberto Bolano, and Calvin Kasulke. In fact, I’ve seen it done so well, and in so many…
Poetry Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Léon-Paul Fargue’s Collection High Solitude

In A Wave of Dreams, Louis Aragon named him one of the “Presidents of the Republic of Dreams,” along with such figures as Sigmund Freud, Pierre Reverdy, and Giorgio de Chirico; in the first Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton declared that he was “surrealist in atmosphere” if not in fact. He was Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947),…
Side A Fiction: “The joint is mine, the wine is yours” by Tomasz Lesniara

The joint is mine, the wine is yours London was lonely. Cold. Empty. As soon as the sun went down and all the pint glasses were sprayed with boiling water inside silver, industrial dishwashers—it was time for laptops and noodles. One of the most celebrated cities on the planet turned into an abandoned ship, drifting…
Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Dancer’s Commute” by Genevieve Murdick

In the mornings, they hose the whole thing down, and the chemical smell of soap—the whirring growl of power hoses—this briefly supplants the pounding sounds of pop music, muffled across wet wood and brick. Some club jammer you remember from 2013; the same way you remember an old friend running into you at Rouses, but…
Side A Poetry: “Standing in rivers getting bit by mosquitoes without cell service” by Linea Jantz

Ed.’s Note: the poem is best viewed horizontal on a cell phone. Standing in rivers getting bit by mosquitoes without cell service mosquitoes rise from the river in avenging crescendo can you hear me now?heat pulses like a heartbeat on my skin air heavy with the breathof sun-baked pines and wild mint I made the…