Author: Heavy Feather

“Onward, Sabine”: Nicole Yurcaba Reviews Ella Baxter’s Novel Woo Woo

Ella Baxter first wowed us with her debut novel New Animal, a darkly humorous exploration of grief’s deepest nooks and crannies and a young woman’s adventures into the BDSM scene. In 2024, Baxter returns to the literary scene with yet another thrilling, eccentric novel—Woo Woo. Woo Woo follows Sabine, an uninhibited and unconventional artist whose…
Poetry Review: Carole Mertz Reads Zilka Joseph’s Collection Sweet Malida

Zilka Joseph’s Sweet Malida focuses on a fascinating and little-known segment of Jewish history. Her topic is the Jewish community of her ancestors and of her immediate family. To learn of a group of travelers having survived as an intact sect within the vast populace of so vast a subcontinent as India, was, to me,…
Fiction Review: Adam Janos Tunnels through Ben Segal’s New Novel

Stories, unlike real life, make sense. In a well-told story, choices have consequences: Pinocchio tells a lie, and so his nose gets longer. But our waking lives are shaped by countless forces, and so it’s impossible to figure out what’s causing what. Have I been fighting with my girlfriend because I hate my job? Or…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by John Bradley

Premonition That a Head Will Take the Shape of a Spellbound Bird When a spell enters the mouth, three strands of sea-greensilk go flying over the ocean. It could be noted they smell like a pickle left on a plate before a blindfolded surgeon. Thrumming and humming, the silk strands melt abovethe White Sands Desert.…
Five Tellings by Moikom Zeqo from His Book Sellers of Chaos

Born in Durrës in 1949, Moikom Zeqo was considered one of Albania’s very most important writers and public intellectuals. (When I visited Zeqo in Tirana in 2019, we couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks without a stranger stopping us to pay respects.) In 1974, Zeqo’s writing was suppressed for incorporating free verse and surrealism,…
Nonfiction Review: Jacob Stovall Reads Jessie van Eerden’s Essay Collection Yoke & Feather

Yoke & Feather, an essay collection by Jessie van Eerden, reaches toward grace, in the deepest sense of that word. That grace is sometimes the grace of a Christian god, yes, but van Eerden more often looks for the grace to be found between people while we wait for that God to show up. Her…
Fiction for Side A: “Dancer” by Joel Henry Little

Dancer Some days when I’m on all fours and the corporate ladder-climbers on retreat are flogging me with their big foam swords, I watch the LEDs halo around the nearest bald head through the honeycomb eyeholes of my wolf costume reeking of weed and piss and I try to make a desert sunset in my…
Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol

Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from bpNichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…
Poetry Review: Rina Shamilov Reads Azad Ashim Sharma’s Collection Boiled Owls

The tenderness of Boiled Owls allows for an exchange of lamentation and suffering (albeit of a different kind) between the poem’s speaker and those he loves. The poems revive memory and depict the process of overcoming addiction’s grip: “I needed to justify my experience without someone else’s voice, but as I said, I’ve got no…