Author: Heavy Feather

Side A Hybrid: “Riparian Way” by Marilyn McCabe

Riparian Way Rains have gone. Dry days settle. The stream: trick, trickle, murmur of a former self, whisper of a way half-borrowed from old courses, half-bullied with melts and storms, wrinkle of ancient bed of sea, ice-scoured, slopping buckets of boulders, scree, writes a history in erratic and rubble. Watching the stream and the river…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Laura Venita Green’s Debut Novel Sister Creatures

A character in Laura Venita Green’s debut novel tells her daughter, “You’ve got to keep the wilderness at bay somehow.” Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town, Pinecreek, in Louisiana, as they. Green blends both realistic fiction, horror, and supernatural elements as the women try to escape past trauma and toxic relationships…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Mark Polizzotti’s Utopic Essay Collection Jump Cuts

Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics, an elegant and thought-provoking new collection of pieces by Mark Polizzotti, opens with an item about poet Paul Eluard’s curiously abrupt disappearance from Paris in March of 1924. Eluard’s months-long abscondment took him to Saigon, with a number of stops at exotic ports…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Susan Landers’ Collection What to Carry into the Future

People sometimes ask poets: “Is your writing true, or did you just make it all up?” The truth (so far as poetry is concerned, anyway) is usually a combination of both, as in the latest collection from Brooklyn-based poet Susan Landers: What to Carry into the Future. The book deftly hybridizes a certain accessible kind…
“A Glass of Milk for Our Collective Gall”: Matthew Zhao on Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Poetry Collection Milk for Gall

Natalie Louise Tombasco invokes Shakespeare to great effect in the title of her debut collection, Milk for Gall, by promising the gamut from comedy to drama and delivering it all with aplomb. The collection’s title comes from the famous speech by Lady Macbeth in Macbeth Act I, Scene V, in which she declares, “Come to…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Boys Taste Better” by E Ce Miller

When Luke Cole goes missing, everyone blames his father. Classic case, folks mouth around town, in line for their lattes, their postage stamps, imagining how an estranged ex-husband might abscond with his own son to torment the kid’s mom. Most figure Luke will turn up in a week or two, sheepishly clutching a body-warmed Big…
Fiction Review: Patrick Parks Reads Kat Meads’ Novella While Visiting Babette

In the last few years, the novella has undergone a resurgence. Some observers attribute its newfound popularity to a readership that has neither the time nor the patience for a novel but is looking for something weightier than a mere short story. And while there are now a growing number of novellas being published and…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Wahidah Tambee’s Typographical Collection Eke

Information theory defines its index in terms of the likelihood of being able to predict the next symbol in a sequence. Counterintuitively, the highest information density appears where a string is entirely random. Given the letters “ajhhjnyv … ,” the next character could be any of the twenty-six options available on a standard keyboard. By…
The Future Has Poetry: “Tuesdays”‘ by R.C. Blenis

The boot descends. The wet thudof sole on skin, the small suckof leather peeling from flesh;the metronome of Mondays.Air squeezed sideways through a mouththat used to make music. The wheeze,the wet whistle, the catch between blows,pressure pressing into softness, the bodybeaten to a beat, a blood-beat drumming downto this dumb thud, this pulp, this pulse.This.…