Author: Heavy Feather
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Frost in the Low Areas, poetry by Karen Skolfield, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson
Frost in the Low Areas reads like a delightful conversation with someone who is so intelligent and perceptive that you don’t realize the profundity of it until she has dropped you off. Then, you find yourself noticing old fans, thinking about the proper way to hold a hand, and wondering whether a touch was a…
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Videotape, poetry by Andrew Zawacki, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt
The world is striated with trajectories, accelerations, projections and predictions in Andrew Zawacki’s Videotape. Clouds become metaphors for computations, extracted and processed patterns become a substrate for new randomness to sprout. “The damascene sky / is a lantern slide, clouds a collodian positive on glass” while “bonbon / wrappers strewn on the hedges / like…
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No Man’s Land, comics by Blexbolex, reviewed by Robert Loss
Because I’m writing this for “here” as opposed to “over there” in the world of comics criticism, I’ll let you in on a secret: no one can agree on what defines a comic. No one. Is it the words/pictures dynamic? Or is it really just pictures-in-sequence, because, come on, what takes up most of the…
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Partial List of People to Bleach, fictions by Gary Lutz, reviewed by Tanner Hadfield
“There’s nothing more to it than the fact that in every moment everything’s over all over again,” Gary Lutz tells Blake Butler in a recent interview. If you’ve read Gary Lutz before, you’ve probably just connected moments to sentences, which is quite keen. Nice work! Virtually every sentence in Partial List of People to Bleach…
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Infinity’s Jukebox, a fiction chapbook by Matthew Burnside, reviewed by Dan Townsend
In an early lecture James Joyce said the “human mind, as it looks forward and backward, attains an eternal state … taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” I don’t know if Matthew Burnside was thinking of Joyce when he titled his chapbook, but Infinity’s…
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Coleen Muir on I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, an essay collection by Jamie Iredell
Jamie Iredell’s I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, published by Future Tense Books, is a collection of nineteen essays that moves linearly from Iredell’s childhood to his early fatherhood. The pieces in this collection range from personal to intellectual, cultural, and political, and hover primarily over topics of body image, racism, sexism, drug…
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The Tide King, a novel by Jen Michalski, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler
Magic and fantasy, the supra and the supernatural are having a good long run in modern fiction. I approve of blurred lines among genre but—grumpy cat impersonator that I am—nothing entrances me less than the promise that I shall be entranced. Because chances are I’m not going to be entranced by the magic of magic…
