Author: Heavy Feather

Nonfiction Review: Lily Blackburn Reads A. V. Marraccini’s Essay We the Parasites

In We the Parasites, a five-part essay/memoir, A. V. Marraccini celebrates and critiques the acute, embodied experience of dedicating one’s life to admiring and critiquing art; the way we move through, haunt, and are haunted by the art that won’t leave us. But rather than locate this experience as solely intellectual, in the delivery of…
Fiction Review: Oli Peters Reads Lauren Cook’s Field Guide Sex Goblin

Oftentimes, Sex Goblin feels like a lustrous alternative to the doomscroll. Non-narrative vignettes—which all utilize an “I” that assumes different lives and situations in each “story”—are transitioned between with short lines that read both like brilliant tweets (“We don’t have to ride or die we can just chill”) and like aphorisms (“The human brain didn’t…
“Bones Blush Brilliant in the Soft Light”: A Conversation with Virgil Suárez

It’s a couple of months to poetry month as I write this. Back when I was a kid poet reading in secret in my bedroom or, later on, rocking it on the Lower East Side, poetry didn’t have a month. Or, if it did, I didn’t know about it. It would have seemed silly to…
Fiction Review: Andrew Farkas Reads Michael Czyzniejewksi’s Collection The Amnesiac in the Maze

According to T.S. Eliot, we supposedly read “many books because we can’t know enough people.” Having experienced (and enjoyed) Michael Czyzniejewski’s stories over the years, I’ve always believed Czyzniejewski agrees with Eliot. After reading his most recent collection, The Amnesiac in the Maze, I no longer need to believe; I know. I think Czyzniejewski would…
Poetry Review: Carole Mertz Reads Ida Börjel’s Collection Ma

Swedish Ida Börjel, like the Scandinavian author Inger Christensen, models her collection on abecedary for her striking 2014 volume. Ma, in its 2023 first English edition, however, resembles the Danish author’s compendium only in its structural format. Unlike Christensen, Börjel’s work is a dark, suffering, and probing account that frequently draws on war, deprivation, and…
Poetry Review: Valentina Linardi Reads Erin Hoover’s Collection No Spare People

No Spare People by Erin Hoover is a tale of female resilience, through different circumstances, places, almost through different lives, narrated in clear, easy to understand words. People and scenes are described in a sprinkling of straightforward expressions that make us feel like a spectator, almost an actor in the ongoing play, strikingly so in…
“the I who meets the eye / in the evaporating pool”: Michael Collins Reads Michael Joseph Walsh’s Poetry Collection Innocence

Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence, winner of the 2021 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition, reads like a book-length meditation that cycles between themes and perspectives, continually recreating the experience of consciousness seeing itself and the world anew. “Common Flowers” beautifully evokes our experience of self-perception through creating and taking in—being taken in by—creative work:…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Évelyne Grossman’s Short Essay The Creativity of the Crisis

We often think of crisis and creativity as related states, as seemingly polar opposites that can reverse polarity at any time, transforming one into the other. Crisis can give rise to creativity just as creativity can provoke a crisis in the creator. Think, for example, of Giorgio de Chirico’s illness and state of depression as…
Fiction Review: Amelia Kingman Reads Bronwyn Fischer’s Novel The Adult

Being eighteen is, well, weird. You are treated as a grown-up, but also like a child. The responsibilities are crushing and new, and the world opens up in exciting, scary ways. No one teaches you how to make friends or how to pay taxes. People fall in and out of your life, and the need…