Author: Heavy Feather
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Contributors’ Corner: Chelsea Laine Wells
Welcome to our new interview series, “Contributors’ Corner,” where we open the floor each week to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Chelsea Laine Wells, whose story “We Sink Like Ships” appears in HFR 3.3. Chelsea Laine Wells is a graduate of the Columbia College of Chicago fiction department whose work…
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Danny M. Hoey, Jr. on Box Cutters, a fiction chapbook by Samuel Snoek-Brown
In his debut chapbook, Samuel Snoek-Brown takes readers through the lives of characters who struggle with what it means to live in and make sense of a world that seems to be slipping from the very fingers by which they try to grasp it. In language that is poetic, evocative, and lean, Snoek-Brown has managed…
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Whittling a New Face in the Dark, poetry by DJ Dolack, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
“People quot(e) / when their empathy is down,” observes the speaker of “What They Want Me to Tell You.” Never resorting to “quotes” or platitudes, Whittling a New Face in the Dark exhibits a brutal empathy. The speakers of these poems stand just inside the thresholds of dark rooms and address us in measured statements…
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Contributors’ Corner: Guy Benjamin Brookshire
Welcome to our new interview series, “Contributors’ Corner,” where we open the floor each week to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Guy Benjamin Brookshire, whose three collages with accompanying captions appear in HFR 3.3. Guy Benjamin Brookshire was born in Searcy, Arkansas, in 1977, got covered in fire ants in 1980,…
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Dear Lil Wayne, epistolary poems by Lauren Ireland, reviewed by Daniel M. Shapiro
Although the epistolary poem has been around since the Roman Empire, it has taken a new turn with the advent of social media. Nowadays, the subjects of letters are much easier to reach; poets don’t need to be as hypothetical in communication. If we like Kevin Bacon’s performance in last night’s episode of The Following,…
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Deep Ellum, a novel by Brandon Hobson, reviewed by Coleen Muir
Deep Ellum, by Brandon Hobson, follows our twenty-something-year-old narrator, Gideon, through the streets of Deep Ellum, a gloomy district in Dallas, Texas, which he has returned to after his mother’s suicide attempt. During his return, he must grapple with his sister, Meg’s, drug use and her mysterious and possibly abusive relationship with a man named…
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Contributors’ Corner: Joe Sacksteder
Welcome to our new interview series, “Contributors’ Corner,” where we open the floor each week to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Joe Sacksteder, whose story/screenplay hybrid “Game in the Sand” appears in HFR 3.3. Joe Sacksteder teaches creative writing at Eastern Michigan University and the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. Later…
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Lake of Earth, prose by William VanDenBerg, reviewed by David Peak
The cover image of Lake of Earth shows a gemstone—its surface angled, smooth, brilliant—that seems to contain an inner light, something Machen might have imagined as harboring a human soul. This gemstone can also be seen as being representative of VanDenBerg’s crystal-clear, lean prose. Take, for example, this brief excerpt from the story “Wife of…
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Book Review: m. forajter on Nicole Wilson’s Poetry Collection Supper & Repair Kit
What is a body? A person? How do we form identities when we exist in bodies we didn’t choose? How do we live when our identities clash so painfully with what the world expects us to be? How do we live when things continually happen to us? Both a reflection of body and of the…
Heavy Feather Review 