Author: Heavy Feather

Murmuration, a fiction chapbook by Ryan Werner, reviewed by Austin Hayden

Ryan Werner’s Murmuration sort of creeps out from the distance like the starlings in the title story—you’ll see. These five stories are sneaky glimpses into what folks call “teenage angst” (but what actually overlaps into your twenties, sticks around for thirty, et cetera). He writes youth in a real way—in a backpack of your dad’s…
“We”: An Interview with c.vance by Ben Spivey

Ignore the limitations of history. All is accounted for as c. vance reimagines the lives of his family from five different perspectives (father, mother, they, we and she). What we have here is a fabulist’s bildungsroman—a possible history told with solid language and emotional sentences. c. vance composes his pseudo family history as if channeled…
Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise, fiction by Justin Lawrence Daugherty, reviewed by Kate Kimball

“‘Why are we training Cerb to fight?’ ‘Because he needs to rediscover his nature.’ ‘What’s his nature?’ Cerb ripped open the dummy’s head. ‘This,’ dad said, pointing. I didn’t get it. I’d seen Cerb eat his own shit once. ‘Like the wolf. Or, like, whatever came before the wolf even.’” Thus begins the strange world…
Appetite, poetry by Aaron Smith, reviewed by Jordan Sanderson

“You’ve waited / your whole life for them to miss you,” Aaron Smith writes in “After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong about the Sadness of Men Who Love Men.” Uttered in the aftermath of an acceptance that feels like an arrival, this declaration satisfies one of the many cravings in Appetite. Yet…
Don’t Kiss Me, short-short-fiction by Lindsay Hunter, reviewed by Will Kaufman

Lindsay Hunter is an amazing practitioner of the short-short-fiction, and her new collection, Don’t Kiss Me, has some truly staggering moments. She can make you hurt more in a few pages than most authors can in a novel. She can make you laugh, and she can strike you dumb with her language. The stories in…
David Peak Reviews The Devotional Poems by Joe Hall

In his 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, Ingmar Bergman famously portrayed a god in the form of a spider. The woman to whom the god appears, a young schizophrenic named Karin, initially reacts to the sight of the spider with horror—and then revulsion. After being administered a sedative, she calms and says, “I was…
The Saddest Place on Earth, poetry by Kathryn Mockler, reviewed by Kate Kimball

“Buddha signed up for Weight / Watchers after his doctor said / he was borderline diabetic,” Kathryn Mockler writes, only to continue with Buddha’s thoughts of wondering “if he could / get in trouble at Weight / Watchers […] if he / could get kicked out.” This illustrates the absurd world that Mockler investigates in…
In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a novel by Matt Bell, reviewed by Patrick Trotti

Matt Bell’s latest offering, published by Soho Press, is his most ambitious to date. In many ways it represents his continued growth as a writer. Moving from the shorter forms (short story collection, chapbooks, and novellas) of his past Bell has put together a novel-length work that may very well be his best writing yet.…
On an Ungrounded Earth, new philosophy by Ben Woodard, reviewed by David Peak

In a 2011 interview conducted by Bookfriendzy, when asked about why he started his multi-disciplinary journal Collapse, Robin Mackay said (and I’m doing my best to transcribe here), “There were a number of problems that it was designed to address, one of which is the problem of where philosophy can exist outside of the academic…