Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jeff Alessandrelli’s Novel about Sex & Shyness & Society And Yet

And Yet is a written record of a nameless narrator’s effort to make sense of his romantic life. He’s a young adult, busy developing a sense of self, and he sees the way his relationships affect that development. He sees that romantic relationships can foster his selfhood, and also that they can warp it. So…
“A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the Harlem Renaissance”: John Schertzer Reads Jon Woodson’s Novel The Staircase Shuffle

Jon Woodson, professor emeritus of Howard University, most notably author of To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, has of late been self-publishing both his recent scholarship as well as a few novels, collections of poetry, and translations of African writers of merit. I’m a fan of all categories of his…
Three Visual Poems by Carolyn Guinzio for Haunted Passages

Limb A Thousand Times We Hold Them Out Before Us Carolyn Guinzio’s eighth collection, Cameo Blue, is forthcoming in 2026 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Earlier books include A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year, and Meanwhile in Arkansas (2025), winner of…
“Creatures of Culture and Perpetrators of Civilization”: Jiwon Choi Talks with Editors of Color in the Landscape of Modern Publishing

In 2015, Lee & Low published The Diversity Baseline Survey, giving us a rundown of who’s working in publishing, including small, medium, and large publishers. Their percentages are as follows: 79% White 7% Asian 6% Hispanic 4% Black 1% Middle Eastern 1% Native American These numbers take into consideration jobs across the board, from editorial…
Poetry Review: Sarah Giragosian Reads Jackie Craven’s Award-Winning Collection Whish

During the pandemic, it was commonplace to hear people talk about how slippery time is. The lockdown dramatized the strange and sinuous qualities of time, the ways that time can stall and slip off the surface of consciousness all at once. These properties of time are difficult to capture, although many poets have tried. Whish…
Poetry Review: Dan Hodgson Reads Diego Báez’s Debut Collection Yaguareté White

By the middle of her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” Caribbean Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip has worked “English” from a “mother tongue” to a “father tongue” to “a foreign anguish” by rubbing it against what “mother tongues” and “father tongues” mean in relief of slavery-era edicts bent on the “removal of tongue[s].”…
Side A Poem by YF Wang: “Love, There Is a Snake in Your Closet”

I think of you with tapeworms in my tummy, like Medusa had stuck her head through my vagina & at seventeen, Ella tells me she thinks she might be pregnant—“My mother is going to kill me”—she says over the bathroom sink, our skins tattooed by the mirror graffiti. A familiar tune rings out the Wellesley…
Fiction Review: Selene dePackh Reads Kurt Baumeister’s Sophomore Novel Twilight of the Gods

Getting swept up by Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Gods is something like being picked up at the airport of the town you grew up in by a favorite sharply funny nephew with ADHD and a brand new driver’s license. If you agree to the tour, he’ll drive you through all the places that have…
Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody is a collection of 52 poems edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, & Kate Lindroos; they call it “the essential James Tate” and the editor’s note says they thought of it as a “book of beloved favorites.” It’s a slim volume, and every poem in it will give readers the Monty…