Author: Heavy Feather

“There Is News Along the Ohio River”: Four Hybrid Pieces from the Future by Beth Gilstrap

XVII. There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in…
Hybrid Essay for Haunted Passages: “Over at the Frankenstein Place” by Joanna Acevedo

Over the past two weeks, please list the items you have lost. As a teenager I knew how to scam my way into the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They still did it at the Chelsea Cinemas, which is closed now, and graffiti adorns its sad plywood window coverings. But this was…
“When the Horrors at Home Are Scarier Than Any Monsters”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Darrin Doyle’s Novel Let Gravity Seize the Dead

Darrin Doyle’s Let Gravity Seize the Dead invites us into a new kind of psychological horror, one that relies on brevity and compression to create the subtle scare tactics that keep us engrossed. Within the novel’s 141 pages, we uncover a trauma-laden story that examines the past, the present, and the myriad of ways one…
Poetry Review: Gina Thayer Reads Jenny Irish’s Poetry Collection Hatch

If you were to open my copy of Jenny Irish’s prose poetry collection, Hatch, you would find margins filled with penciled half-thoughts and doodles of anatomically dubious fireflies. I’m not usually one to mark up a book, but Hatch works in mysterious ways, subtly shifting how we interact with the world. Through linked prose poems…
“Il Divino”: A Hybrid Travelogue by Brandi George

And there was Michelangelo, the famous Renaissance painter who I worshipped as a child, writing his name over and over on the pages of my notebook, as if the meaning of life was there in the syllables: Michelangelo Michelangelo Michelangelo Mich-el-ang-el-o I grew up on a farm, and the only books I had access to…
Side A: Two Poems by Arden Levine

To the Trade Through the driver’s side window comes sunto burn my thighs as I look for new fire out there:the many tongues of trees, that cardinal plumage,those things that turn over and over and over. Most people get about eighty autumns.But, when put that way, it seemsa scam, the rest held below the counter,the…
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…