Author: Heavy Feather

The Last Days of California, a novel by Mary Miller, reviewed by Sam Price

There’s a theory in neuroscience that brains “couple” when undergoing successful communication. The speaker’s brain will utilize its portions that are necessary for speech production while the listener, with a slight delay, uses the portions that are necessary for speech comprehension. If the brains aren’t “coupled,” there is little retained knowledge in the listener, even…
EarthBound, nonfiction by Ken Baumann, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

EarthBound—and I mean the videogame here, not the store—was released stateside for the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1995. On front of the packaging, an imposing gold Starman stood with its hands … or tentacles … planted on its hips against a psychedelic backdrop. Reflected in its visor was a small boy wearing a…
“Night Songs”: An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling by Sally Deskins

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of sixteen books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and a forthcoming hybrid genre collection called Fortress from Sundress Publications. Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the…
Local Souls, three novellas by Allan Gurganus, reviewed by Brian Oliu

Despite the fact that I have lived in the South for eight years, I would never consider myself “a Southerner,”—not out of the fact that I have any shame in making this statement: I love my adopted hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama & fully embrace its quirks as charm. When friends of mine from north of…
Bark, new stories by Lorrie Moore, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

Lorrie Moore’s Bark is her first short story collection in fifteen years, but the author, while growing deeper in her craft, has not moved far afield from her previous obsessions. The stories have become darker and more haunted than those of Birds of America and Self-Help, now even with literal ghosts. The collection is best…
“The Straightforward Prose of Ben Marcus?”: Daniel J. Cecil Reviews Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

When I joined Versal back in 2010, I was curious what other editors at the journal were reading. I was most interested in what Robert Glick, my fiction editor was intrigued by, and in response to my asking he gave two suggestions: read the Collected Fictions of Borges (which he kindly gifted to me), and devour…
My Dead, poetry by Amy Lawless, reviewed by Jillian M. Phillips

My Dead is a poetry collection that stays with you. This isn’t a book of poems that can be read individually and easily forgotten. Each piece is somehow connected to the others. Every turn of the page creates a new reason to revisit what you’ve read. The collection invites you to stay and ruminate on…
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, stories by Kelly Luce, reviewed by Molly Patterson

The title story of Kelly Luce’s beautiful, strange, and compact collection lives up to its promise: it’s a weird little thing in three parts, featuring a central character and magic and a Japanese backdrop. It is the oddest of the ten stories, or perhaps one of two that are spectacularly non-narrative. The other eight operate…
The Next Monsters, a poetry collection by Julie Doxsee, reviewed by David Peak

Doxsee’s poems are shattered mirrors; they are fractured, jagged. If you stare at them long enough, you’ll uncover patterns in the chaos, hints of a larger image that was perhaps banished to a new and frightening dimension when the mirror was broken—like the big moment at the end of Prince of Darkness that leaves you…