Author: Heavy Feather

A Review of Daniel Romo’s When Kerosene’s Involved by Jordan Sanderson

Direct and accessible, the poems in When Kerosene’s Involved blaze with memory. As the title suggests, fire is a common motif in the book, but it kindles in unexpected places. While the tone remains steady throughout the collection, Romo creates several personae, alludes to a broad range of pop culture icons—often reimagining them in other…
“I Thought Often of the Hem of a Skirt, Unraveling While Someone Runs, the Thread Creating Its Own Design”: An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess by Nathan Moore

Here I get the chance to talk to Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess about collaboration and their book X Marks the Dress: A Registry, forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2014. Our conversation takes place via e-mail over a period of about two weeks. Carol Guess is the author of eleven books: Seeing Dell…
Michael J Seidlinger Reviews Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia: A Biography of Place

“It’s a story full of death and dying, living and life, tits and ass and balls and dicks and pussy. It’s an old, old, old story that always begins—they begat and they begat and they begat.” It is every story; or, in the case of Crapalachia, Scott McClanahan’s latest, it is the story of family,…
Cassandra Gillig Reviews My Pet Serial Killer, a novel by Michael J Seidlinger

My Pet Serial Killer’s hyper-hip cover and cutesy name (a My Little Pony-quality endearment, tried and true) do a poor job of preparing the reader for the grotesqueries which will bombard him or her throughout. Set against a backdrop of clubbing and collegiate education, Seidlinger’s story revolves around Claire, a young female grad student, who…
Joshua Kleinberg Review: Long Division, poetry by Alan Michael Parker

The title of Alan Michael Parker’s most recent collection, Long Division, reveals a dialogic tension that the twenty-first century poet can’t help but consider—if not in his poems, then certainly in his heart. Parker’s recurring discussion of simple mathematical concepts, in poems such as “The Biologist from Pennsylvania” and “Family Math,” takes on the surprisingly…
Review: Jordan Sanderson on Underlife and Portico, poetry by Michael Lynch

As I read Michael Lynch’s Underlife and Portico, I kept thinking about what another poet once told me: “Seamus Heaney’s poetry comes as close to pure sound as you can get and still make sense.” During the first read, I didn’t care what the poems were about; I simply reveled in the lush soundscape. However,…
Review: Jillian M. Phillips on The Diegesis, a collaborative text by Chas Hoppe & Joshua Young

When reading The Diegesis by Chas Hoppe & Joshua Young, one has to know the definition of “diegesis” in order to fully appreciate it. This fantastic word is a style of (traditionally) fiction which presents an interior view of the world through the narrator’s experience. In this collaboration, the poets have taken this idea to…
Review: Louise Henrich on Vampires in the Lemon Grove, short stories by Karen Russell

I think it would be a good idea, while reading Karen Russell’s newest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, to read the title of each story and hypothesize what the story might actually be about. Most likely you’ll be wrong, unless you think the title story is about vampires in the lemon grove, in which…
Review: Louise Henrich on Promising Young Women, fragmentary tales by Suzanne Scanlon

To verbalize what makes this book so wonderful is to do it an injustice, but I’ll try anyway. There have been many books and movies, some which were referenced, that have dealt with women who have been institutionalized, or have dealt with severe mental or emotional problems. Promising Young Women adds an ineffable quality to…