Author: Heavy Feather

“Portrait as Landscape”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White’s Poetry Collection The Under Hum

The Under Hum is a small book that is large and generous in so many ways: double the usual number of authors, and full of lines by modern working poets that “seed” the invented poetic forms and linguistic experiments of this collaboration. The Surrealist feminists have arrived and they come with ghostly memories and scars,…
Two Poems for Bad Survival by Jiji Lubis

Reluctant superhero eats brains for supper I sometimes butter them with diesel / and fry them at one-hundred-eighty-degree heat / for three hundred sixty seconds. / Or boil them in freezing rose water, / pricking them till they become mushy / as I wait for the water to boil. // Of course they seek to…
Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
Poetry from the Future: “The Uncertainty Ballade” by Daniel Brennan

And of these rivers which curve as all rivers curve the way a scythe claims wheat there the gun’s warm tongue in your hands admire how these hands spread with worship like a greasy and over-thumbed takeout menu no this is not my native violence never the ease of inheritance the violets they are mid-bloom…
Side A Poetry: “It Might as Well Be” by Max Winter

It Might as Well Be Which is a stateIf the weather holdsAnd the wind arrives timelyIf it’s right it’s easyAs being hit by a carOr scooped from a litterHappiness for everybodyAnd a carbonated lime drinkWith a talking sailboatFinishing my sentencesAt moments you think for meLittle boatLittle squireI bequeath you everythingBut we’re not thereYet are weI…
“Spirit Rock”: Matthew Sidney Parsons Talks with Wes Blake about His Book Pineville Trace

Wes Blake lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, and is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize. Pineville Trace follows Frank Russet, as he sets off on a quest following a cat named Buffalo. After Frank escapes from a prison in Kentucky, his journey to find meaning in the absence of his…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Brendan Gillen’s Debut Novel Static

Brendan Gillen’s debut novel follows a trio of musicians trying to survive in New York City. Static explores the sacrifices artists make, the realities of who makes it big and who doesn’t, and the messy but sometimes magical process of collaborative creation. The novel is told from the point of view of Paul, who is…
Poetry Review: Jordan Hamel Reads Michael Chang’s Collection Toy Soldiers

The term “Gruen Transfer,” named after some dead Austrian architect, defines the state of idealized hyperreality realized by deliberate reconstruction of a person’s surroundings. Every time you take that first step into a giant mall, there’s a small moment; a moment of disorientation and confusion as you survey the chaos of new surroundings, a moment when…