Author: Heavy Feather

Echo Lake, a novel by Letitia Trent, reviewed by Gabino Iglesias

Any narrative that manages to create and successfully convey a distinctive mood deserves to be called atmospheric. However, there are novels that possess an atmosphere so strong, so inescapable that it turns the narrative into an unbelievably engrossing reading experience. More than atmospheric, these rare novels deserve to be called something far more powerful: mesmerizing.…
Silence Once Begun, a novel by Jesse Ball, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter

I recently re-watched the famed Coen brother’s film, Fargo, with my wife, having last seen it in my teens and remembering virtually nothing about it. The film’s notorious for its opening text: “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors,…
Lost in Space: A Father’s Journey There and Back Again, essays by Ben Tanzer, reviewed by Leesa Cross-Smith

I don’t read a lot of essay collections and I’m way pickier about the essays I read. I’ll pretty much read any work of fiction if it’s short enough, but essays, no. I wish I could explain exactly why or what it is, but I cannot. All I know is that when an essay is…
If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep, poems by Joe Wenderoth, reviewed by Ezekiel Black

When I was an undergraduate, I took an Introduction to Creative Writing class with Brian Henry. I took this class almost on a whim. I had thought about writing before, but I did not know much about contemporary letters, especially about how to write such poetry, fiction, etc. Brian Henry assigned Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s…
Nevers, fictions by Megan Martin, reviewed by Alex McElroy

In his first letter to Franz Kappus, Rainer Marie Rilke advises the young poet to decide, first and foremost, “Must I write?” Necessity is one of the simplest and most overlooked requirements for the writer; it is often taken for granted when the activity, writing, precedes its necessity. Megan Martin’s second collection, Nevers, a slim…
Contributors’ Corner: Jeff Tigchelaar

Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Jeff Tigchelaar, whose poems appear in 3.3. Jeff Tigchelaar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Pleiades, LIT, North American Review, The Offending Adam, Flint Hills Review, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in anthologies including Best…
Robert Loss Reviews This One Summer, a young adult graphic novel by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki

Summer is float-time for some people, especially kids, and as This One Summer‘s pre-adolescent protagonist Rose says, “It feels good. Floating. It feels like flying.” But it’s worth noting that Rose clings to an inner-tube as she says this; no one can float forever, not safely, anyway. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s poignant graphic novel…
“I Like the Idea of a Little Kid Walking Into a Comic Store and Finding Something They Can Sink Their Teeth Into”: An Interview with Jesse Moynihan by Colette Arrand

Read a page of Jesse Moynihan’s Forming. Really. One. They’re all available for free on his website for you try-it-before-you-buy-it types, and for those of you who don’t have a comic book store, or the type of store that stocks collections published by Nobrow Press. I’ll do it with you: I just flipped open my…
On the Street of Divine Love, new and selected poems by Barbara Hamby, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

Barbara Hamby’s On the Street of Divine Love is magnificent. Containing fifteen new poems and a distillation of her previous four collections, it should secure her place among the best American poets. Hamby is the master of the contemporary ode, many of which are included here, and the collection as a whole is an ode…