Author: Heavy Feather
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Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads K Hank Jost’s MadStone
There are a lot of different ways of being poor, and I have tried out several. I don’t want to oversell it. I’ve never lived on the street or anything. I’ve always had a safety net—parents who love me, and wouldn’t let me fall off the map without a fight—but there were definitely years when…
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A Short Comic for Side A: “The heart of a blue whale weighs 400 pounds” by Sylvia Santiago & Helena Pantsis
Mini-interview with Sylvia Santiago & Helena Pantsis HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as collaborators (or continues to)? HP: When working with people who specialize in different genres, there’s a real learning curve from both ends when it comes to anticipating how your work will be interpreted as well as how…
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Fiction Review: Mary Lynn Reed on Ashley Cowger’s On the Plus Side
Life is a delicate balancing act. For every decision that must be faced, there are pros and cons to be weighed. Is that boyfriend in L.A. worth giving up a paid internship for? How much does the tally tip when you factor in his flea-ridden dog? Is buying yourself expensive bracelets for your birthday worse…
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Poetry Review: Jeanne Griggs Reads Mildred Kiconco Barya’s The Animals of My Earth School
The Animals of My Earth School, by Mildred Kiconco Barya, is a collection of poems about animals, surveying a few of the characteristics that they share with people and calling our attention to what we might see if we try looking at the world from the eye level of other kinds of creatures. Barya, originally…
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“Language as Collison and Fragment”: Edward Smallfield Reads Alexandra Mattraw’s Poetry Collection Raw Anyone
Raw Anyone is a title that asks us to ask what a title is. A title can locate (A Journal of the Plague Year) or gesture in a direction (The Wasteland). Raw Anyone feels like a fragment of language set free: uncooked, in a natural state, and in motion, searching, perhaps, to connect with an…
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Joanna Pearson Discusses Small in Real Life with Short-Story Author Kelly Sather
Kelly Sather’s collection of nine stories, Small in Real Life, reads with a sure-handedness that belies the fact that this marks her debut. It’s no wonder this book was chosen by guest judge Deesha Philyaw for the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and has garnered early praise from writers like Garth Greenwell and Yiyun Li. Sather…
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Fiction Review: Jack Quinn Reads The Return by James Terry
Watching French film professor Bernard Aoust vainly grasping at the sands of time makes for captivating reading. Set in the author’s alma mater—UC Berkeley—we feel we are visiting an old haunt; such is Terry’s vivid description of the place. There we find fuddy-duddy Aoust in the timorous autumn years of his career, bewildered by the…
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Book Review: Shannon Nakai Reads Joy Harjo’s Selected Poems Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
In her foreword of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years, Iowa Writer’s Workshop classmate and fellow writer Sandra Cisneros underscores the racial and cultural identity of her longtime Indian friend, an identity that made Harjo vulnerable to dismissal and otherness in the…
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Three Flavor Town USA Poems by Kathleen Hellen
every animal is broken differently cook it slow, the butcher says, like jazz or countrywestern—doesn’t matter something you can dance to—something you can masterlike chief cook and bottle-washer, recognize that parrot is a noun, that parrot is a table mannerthat you always start with definition, recognize the cuts as hangers flap meat Denver steaks coulotte,…
Heavy Feather Review 