Author: Heavy Feather

“We’re All Renting an Experience”: David Harrison Horton Reads Anthony Tao’s Poetry Collection We Met in Beijing

Anthony Tao is a well known figure in Beijing. He’s the coordinator of Spittoon Beijing (an English language writing collective) and a part of Poetry x Music Band which has released an album and accompanying poetry booklet. We Met in Beijing is Tao’s debut poetry collection. The book is divided into four sections, which are…
Poetry Review: Saturn Browne Reads Kinsale Drake’s Debut Collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, chosen as one of the 2024 winners of the National Poetry Contest by Jacqueline Trimble, span across themes of family, legacy, colonialism, femininity, and mythology, with many poems set in the American South/Southwest. Through her imagery and linguistic choices, Drake makes a radical…
The Future Has Fiction: “Entering Heaven Alive” by Elijah Sparkman

I was telling my students about the drought that was coming. The floods. Climate change and refugees. Storms. Famines. The droughts and the deaths. We were at Northern Michigan University. It was a Good Books Class. We were reading Octavia Butler and my students were from the suburbs of Minneapolis, the rural farmlands of Wisconsin,…
New Side A Fiction: “Vesuvio” by Patricia Quintana Bidar

Vesuvio Salvador has suggested they meet at Vesuvio. For him, the bar is a place of nostalgia. Whereas, Luisa has never left San Francisco. Lives in that same rent-controlled studio on upper Grant, where she paints, teaches, and sleeps. She stops first for coffee and a sandwich at Trieste. “One clarifying gin,” she tells Jacques,…
New Side A Poetry: “Spicer’s Radar” by Michelle Bitting

Spicer’s Radar ~ after Jack Spicer after Marianne Moore In that moment no one exactly knows the direction the cloud swims or how my face looks going on its hungry journey. First, my fat heart unburies itself. Then, this handful of granola sanded with turmeric reminds me of gold. Passing as if it were sun.…
Fiction Review: Jacob M. Appel on Seth Rogoff’s New Novel The Castle

Franz Kafka’s unfinished final novel, The Castle, stands out as the most sophisticated and elusive of the author’s abstruse and infinitely generous corpus. The enigmatic tale relates the tribulations of the land surveyor, K., summoned in error to a Central European village governed by the inept bureaucratic retainers of Count Westwest. A century after Kafka’s…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Douglas J. Penick’s Vikram-Vetala Retellings The Oceans of Cruelty

Oh great king, this world we traverse together is, as you know, a sea of cruel desires and insatiable deceits. Let me distract you with stories from another place and another time. The Oceans of Cruelty is a reinterpretation of the Sanskrit epic, the Vetala Panchavimshati, which spans twenty-five parables told within a framing narrative,…
Poetry for Flavor Town USA: “Exercise for Beginners” by Marc Janssen

Do people breathe differentlyWhen they are running in their dreams?I had a dog that would run in his sleep,His feet would quiver as he chased chipmunks up trees made of canine fantasy.Eyes movingScanning the inside of his lids. I wish there was a dreaming dietWhere I could run marathons while unconscious,And in the morning, wake…
“… and they were unafraid”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Roz Dineen’s Debut Novel Briefly Very Beautiful

In an apocalyptic world where fires ravage acre upon acre of land and the globe has entered a perpetually hot summer, a young mother struggles to make the correct decision about moving her children to one of the few unscathed remnants of countryside remaining. Meanwhile, the skies in the City turn orange with toxins, and…