Author: Heavy Feather

“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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “found this today” by Erin Lyndal Martin & Pris Sears

RadioHeads Private Lounge >> Direct Message >> Mar 8 2021,11:04From: ✨ FrankieSay >> To: 🌥️ CloudJockeyRe: Songs in the static? I saw your post about the tape you made from music you heard between stations. I know you don’t know me, but you should really check out the recent posts in Random on the Raresounds…
“Strings Astray:” A Poem for Haunted Passages by Lindsay Donovan

You pitter on your bike across the boulevard, past the litter, the small dog jackets,and tour bus flyers. You bought your bike for LA cheap, it brakes properly and night signalsbut its not doing too hot. Too hot out in Venice, you pull up to the driveway, quiet, as you tryto choke down filmy, office…
Poetry Review: Erica Bernheim Reads Mid/South Sonnets, an Anthology Edited by C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd

“Tell me about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! Rather than attempting to locate what the South is or “simply” to define the form, C.T. Salazar & Casie Dodd’s anthology, Mid/South Sonnets, prioritizes description and…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “Ode to the Beginning of Things Between Us” by Max Lasky

Love is a beetle in the brainsays my horoscope today, whichmakes me think of my wife’schildhood nickname, Beetle, a playon her middle name, Betul, Turkish for virgin, or pure, a nameshe abandoned by the wayside aftersplitting hearts with wedge and sledgehammer, the way experience accrues around firewoodlike dead leaves in the fenced in cornerof our…