Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Adam McPhee Reads Scott Mitchel May’s Novel Awful People

A reunion of a group of friends looms on the horizon of Awful People, the new novel by Scott Mitchel May. The friends, whose lives once loosely revolved around employment at the Antiquated Brewing Company in Madison, Wisconsin, haven’t seen each other since 2009, their ties shattered after one of their number developed LSD-induced telekinetic…
Side A English-to-English Poetry Translation: “The Morning of the Poem” by Matthew Klane

The Morning of the Poem Bonjour madame,I am the Marcel Proustof toast and jam,orange juice,honeydew melonoatmeal,The Irish kindcoffee and the news:I’d like to sharea pipe with Baudelaire,Youcould be mynineteenth-centurydandy dudeTyping pseudo-symbolismsomething meaning somethingdoesn’t mean a thingat all:I’ve searchedthe collected WilliamCarlos Williamsfor something calledthe Poison Line:a shortand seeminglySenseless:“Are you surewe shouldn’t justgo to church?”no siree,Bob!Who has…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Rikki Ducornet’s Novella The Plotinus

Forget “Call me Ishamel” and try on this opening line instead: “Agitated and pressed for time, I grabbed the knobby stick—a harmless memento of the footpath—now long gone—that had for a time provided access to the woods (such as they were) and ran into the street unprepared for the inevitable encounter (such a dope!) with…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by LM Brimmer

Un-Imagined Mother n. • I dreamt a baby again • the morning after my empty womb evolved through the limitless contraction • Mother ? I can’t. Mother I can’t. • just your painful, irreverant abdomen, halfling eye half cortex • accustomed to the gut of a wolf • grieflonging has grayed me • Mother of…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ben Tanzer’s Novel The Missing

Parenthood can be rife with worst case scenarios, all of them truly the worst. It’s a state I was blissfully unaware of when I was a young father still set in youth’s phase of invincibility, but now that I’m a grandfather, I often worry about higher stakes. All those potential worst cases now hovering around…
Natalie Marino: Two Poems for Haunted Passages

If I Were a King I could believe in God. I would wish the grapefruitheld in my handcould turn into a little sun. I would refuse to seethat everything born before me was already gold,that even wealth can’t stop a daughter from cryingat the sight of a hardened rose. If I were a king,I wouldn’t…
New Side A Nonfiction Essay: “Butt Stuff” by Florence Fishburne

Butt Stuff —for Willy Woodcock THE BEGINNING: MEETING W SPD (shits per day): 4-5 I might’ve been wiping my ass and watching a film from the Criterion Collection on my phone when I first matched with him. W. That’s not how they all start. There are others. But he was special. Is. Thin eyebrows that…
“A Field Guide to Our Precarious Hive”: Robert Glick Reads Shena McAuliffe’s Short Story Collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness

Shena McAuliffe’s third book, the inventive and quietly powerful story collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness, acts as a field guide to characters who devote themselves to systems of belief—a business model, a pseudo-science, a taxonomy of the body—at odds with their lived conditions. The friction between the imaginary and the real, however, isn’t particularly…
Three Original Prose Poems by Michael Robins

On Solitude What can only be a perfect phrase, hurried on the back of a receipt, subsequently caught in the wind & flown forever away. Your eyes are not what they were, imperfect & especially in the morning before gravity once more proves us little. First to sit in the reglazed tub, its waters rise…