Author: Heavy Feather

Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol

Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from bpNichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…
Poetry Review: Rina Shamilov Reads Azad Ashim Sharma’s Collection Boiled Owls

The tenderness of Boiled Owls allows for an exchange of lamentation and suffering (albeit of a different kind) between the poem’s speaker and those he loves. The poems revive memory and depict the process of overcoming addiction’s grip: “I needed to justify my experience without someone else’s voice, but as I said, I’ve got no…
Side A Poem: “Glow” by Never Angeline North

Glow “Gardening. No hope for the future.” —Franz Kafka, from his diaries In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life. In the first part of my life, I did things. In the second part of my life I do not. In between…
Five Poems by Bad Survivalist Elizabeth Zuba

On Water and Habitats Oceans are flowers. I am made fertile in the land of my affliction. Any terrestrial salamander halfway through being an egg will swim away and be aquatic forever if you crack it open and drop it in water, or at least that’s how it was the last time I tried it!…
Fiction for Haunted Passages: “Avalon” by Sarah Goodman

It was nothing new, really. A parking lot. A minor indignity. The driver rolled his window down and a man of some sinister age breathed out into the cold. Something about him was spiritually misshapen. He gaped at me with eyes so wide you could see the white all around his irises; like a cartoon…
New Criticism: “Four Ways Poetry Predicted the Internet” by Joanna Fuhrman

“There are poets like John Ashbery for whom the internet seems to have been invented for who probably never sent an email” —William Lessard, from an email When I started writing Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about digital life, it was not because I had anything to add to the debate about how…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “Three Weeks Post-op with a Lightning Bug” by Gary McDowell

Friends and family keep checking in. Keep her safe, they say. Keep her comfortable, they say. Tell her we love her, they say. And you too. Early this morning, maybe 6:30, I stand in the kitchen making her breakfast, the dogs at my side—they herd me, sun-up to sun-down, are never more than a body-length…
Poetry Excerpt: From Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary by Eric Lindley & Joe Milazzo

Freightv.1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.2. To mumble from the heart.3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey…
The Future Has Fiction: “Scarecrows” by John Mitchell

I was only ever good at two things and being a mother wasn’t one of them. I knew how to disappear when things got hard, and I knew how to make everything worse when I showed back up. True to form, the flood came six months after I returned home. The sea levels rose so…