Author: Heavy Feather
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“Jane Gregory’s Cryptology: De/coding My Enemies”: A Poetry Review by Candice Wuehle
Jane Gregory’s first book, My Enemies, possesses the density, richness and protean quality of a book that seems to feel not only its own moral weight, but also its mortality. Gregory’s never breathless speaker is nonetheless often at haste, always imbued with the energy of the continuing line but seemingly uncertain of their own capacity…
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Bad Survivalist: “Survival and Poetry,” an essay exploring World War I Poetry by Ezekiel Black
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon, which was cause for celebration, but to complete the mission, they had to return to Earth. President Nixon’s speechwriter, William Saffire, wrote this speech in case Apollo 11 became stranded on the moon: Fate has ordained that…
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Noir: A Love Story, a novel by edward j rathke, reviewed by Nick Sweeney
There is something to be said about authors who manage to publish their first writings. There are always tales of novels in trunks in the attic, projects that you just couldn’t find a way to finish or a publisher to run with. For instance, it is one thing to read Stephen King’s Carrie, an incredible…
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Fiction Review: Stephanie Marker Reads I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life by Michael Czyzniejewski
To step into the world of one of Michael Czyzniejewski’s stories is to abandon, either voluntarily or by force, all pretenses, to strip away any semblance of grace or elegance from the sordid mosh pit of human relationships in which we all find ourselves. His work has revitalized a term that bad rock writers have…
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Repairable Men, a novel by John Carr Walker, reviewed by John Vanderslice
It’s always thrilling—and reassuring—to discover a talented new writer in his very first book-length effort. Such is the case with John Carr Walker and his recently released short story collection, the aptly if ironically named Repairable Men. Not only is this one of the shrewdest and darkest story collections I’ve read in years, but it…
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Wild Grass on the Riverbank, poetry by Hiromi Itō, reviewed by AK Afferez
(Be carried from your native land to foreign soil, where you will grow wild and propagate) Marking her return to poetry, Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō is first and foremost a textual space where language can seek out the wildest, most visceral modes of expression. This lush, entangled narrative poem follows…
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A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, a novel by Eimear McBride, reviewed by Jack Kaulfus
Eimear McBride’s debut, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, has finally seen its day. The winner of the Desmond Elliot Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction, and numerous other awards, is a darkly thrilling coming-of-age story of an Irish girl trapped in a life bent on killing her before she becomes…
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Michael Gossett Reviews Super Mario Bros. 2, video game nonfiction by Jon Irwin
“Playing a Mario game is about finding secrets,” Jon Irwin writes in Super Mario Bros. 2, the final installment in the first series of video game books from the innovative publishers at Boss Fight Books. And anyone who has picked up a Nintendo controller knows this to be true: from Warp Zones and Star Worlds…
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“To Escape to Something Beyond the World”: Matt Weinkam Interviews Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco has been busy. In the last five years, she has written five books, including A Compendium of Domestic Incidents, which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize judged by Ben Marcus. She published stories in Conjunctions,…
