Author: Heavy Feather

Haunted Passages Nonfiction: “Leap” by Karen Crawford

It was a number you didn’t want to celebrate, but of course, I surprised you. A room at the “castle on the hill” with its California bungalows, French-style turrets, and an old school New York Park Avenue vibe. It was the infamous penthouse suite 54. It was famous people undercover. It was too much champagne.…
“The ‘secret / undulating form’ of Erin Marie Lynch’s Collection Removal Acts”: A Poetry Review by Michael Collins

Drawing its title from the American legislation promulgating the severing of multiple Native American nations from their homes, Erin Marie Lynch’s debut collection deeply inhabits psychological tensions of the sort that those who undertook the original Removal Acts could not. A Dakota descendant, Lynch’s perspectives on this legacy are also informed, in part, by the…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Richard Loranger’s Collection Mammal

The latest poetry collection from multi-genre writer, performer, and artist Richard Loranger should be read aloud whenever possible. It is fit for the acoustics of any space: an outdoor park, a busy street corner, commercial flights, bars, art galleries. In one moment, the work jets out lines of willful cacophony: “a beaming lump of ectoplasm…
Josh Denslow & Bradley Sides Talk about Their New Books Super Normal and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood

Josh Denslow’s Super Normal tells the story of siblings who possess superpowers coming together as they receive devastating news about their mother. Bradley Sides’ Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood explores the southern lives of individuals taking care of pond monsters, running garlic farms, and fighting their dinosaur siblings. With their new books, Denslow and…
Justin Bryant and Alex Miller Discuss White People on Vacation

White People on Vacation is the story about the struggle to live a meaningful life in the era of late-stage capitalism. More specifically, it is about a group of college students (white) who take a vacation (cursed) to Hawaii, which is paid for by their parents (loaded). Everybody has a terrible time in this portrait…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Matthew Baker’s Graphic Novel The Sentence

In Matthew Baker’s The Sentence, the new government of the United States is a military dictatorship that executes dissenters and displays their rotting bodies on the steps of the Supreme Court, with a soldier posted to shoot any vultures that fly too near. The methods of execution are creatively gruesome in the way of speculative…
Poetry Review: Kimberly Swendson Reads Maria Hardin’s Debut Collection cute girls watch when i eat aether

pulling at the hem of time unraveling my self in the process there is no health you whisper only livingmy sick sick rose A sick, sick rose is Maria Hardin’s perennial calling card in her debut poetry collection, cute girls watch when I eat aether. The poems of this collection drag along the soft and…
Sneak Preview: “Prologue: Eternal Weimar” from David Leo Rice’s New Novel The Berlin Wall

Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria,…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joe Koch’s Story Collection Invaginies

Over the past few years, as I’ve delved further into indie and experimental literature and been exposed to the dazzling array of queer writers thriving therein, I’ve discovered something of a bad habit in myself—a tendency to automatically read as-yet-unidentified narrators as the same gender as their authors. I’ve been caught with my comprehensive pants…