Author: Heavy Feather

“There Is So Much to Unlearn”: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz by Jax Connelly

When I was sixteen, I had a fat crush on my boss at the grocery store where I scanned boxes of cereal and punched in produce codes for five dollars an hour. He was twenty-four, a community college dropout with dyed-black hair and a tattoo of a guitar stretching out over the back of his…
Fiction Review: Elizabeth H. Winkler Reads Jen Michalski’s Novel All This Can Be True

If you begin Jen Michalski’s All This Can Be True on the bus, you’ll almost certainly miss your stop. Written in alternating points of view, the book is as much a story of self discovery and queer coming-of-age as it is a story of love, and Michalski tells it well. Our protagonists are Lacie Johnson…
Author Annie Hartnett in Conversation with Rachel Reeher

Annie Hartnett is the kind of writer that makes you laugh when you shouldn’t. The kind of writer that, in one moment, has you hoping no one is looking over your shoulder as you crack up over utter tragedy, and, in the next moment, has you welling up over the most perfectly executed joke. Nothing…
Poetry Review: Jen Schneider Reads Elizabeth Galoozis’ Collection Law of the Letter

What happens when you combine the literary prowess of a skillful and soulful poet-librarian like Elizabeth Galoozis with the space to reorder understanding, instill voice in silenced letters, expand contractions into new shapes, and infuse original meaning into common language? As Law of the Letter illustrates, there’s the possibility of magic—magic in the form of…
Fiction Review: Emily Hall Reads Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross’ Collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way

In Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross’ short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way characters teeter on the edge of an epiphany. But they stumble before they can access any greater understanding of their lives. Some stories feature parents who can’t connect to their children, refusing to see how their own behavior is alienating.…
“Inescapable Derivation”: Matt Martinson Reads Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest

Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest, the only work of nonfiction she would publish in her lifetime, was first published in 1945 by Scribners, re-released by Dalkey Archive in 1994, and was recently re-re-released as a Dalkey Archive Essential. Recently, Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, has become a critical darling, a sort of lost classic.…
Joe Milazzo: Four Poems from Plain Language

Plain Language The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten.…
“INFERNO: Just Like Gold”: ES Sandberg on August Strindberg’s Autofictional Novel

A very wise person once posited that the historical provenance of Sweden’s sustainable mindset is attributed to the absence of substantial oil reserves. Wealth has never been on tap, so to speak, and as such the country implemented something more long-term, if not resilient by cultivating and expanding on renewable practices. Danes on the other…
Fiction Review: Arreshy Young Reads Joachim Glage’s Apocryphal Story Collection The Devil’s Library

There is an unraveling in the testamental helices of the AJPD which speaks: “A man is a scream, smothered by the avalanche.” And from that strand there breeds this gonadal fiqh: “the blood of those who submit to the squeeze—the breeders, the feeders, the readers corresponding to the serfs, the megalopolis and the monastery—evaporate communally.…