Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry Review: Stephen Meisel Reads Dorothea Lasky’s Collection The Shining

It’s no secret that fire sign Dorothea Lasky believes in ghosts. Besides the essay “Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” in which she quite literally says so, one might notice the phantoms that haunt her poems’ yellow hallways. They might need rain boots to avoid the floods of milk and blood coming from God knows…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Chloe Chun Seim’s Illustrated Novel-in-Stories Churn

Churn, the debut novel by Chloe Chun Seim, is a work of considerate prose, intense emotional undercurrents, and painterly sensibilities. Seim’s writing often keeps its attention to aesthetics at the forefront while still packing an impressive punch, making it feel at times like an impressionist painting on the business end of a sledgehammer, and at…
“Easy to Advanced Hand Puppets”: A Short Story for Side A by Dolan Morgan

Easy to Advanced Hand Puppets Introduction When was the last time you made a hand puppet? Or, for that matter, when was the last time you did anything? Something real. Be honest. Right, okay: then you might as well make hand puppets. And for that, you’ve come to the right place: an instructive, easy to…
“Deeper into the Fog”: Jonathon Atkinson Reads Bennett Sims’ Fiction Collection Other Minds and Other Stories

Bennett Sims’ fiction is populated by zombies, werewolves, and ghosts, but the essential horror lurking in his work is that trust—of oneself, of others, of the world—may be impossible. Almost to a person, his characters find themselves unable to fathom others. They are racked, as the title of his most recent book suggests, by the…
“A Love without Subject or Object”: Peter Valente on Claire DeVoogd’s Poetry Collection Via

For Jack Spicer, something remains when everything has been destroyed, and all attempts to find the Holy Grail have failed: God-language. The darkness from which is born the light. An anti-Grail, perhaps. There is no relief, no stability, no great achievement at the end of the road to imbue your life with meaning. You felt…
Five Poems: Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

This Doom I am still learning to die for myself.I can’t unremember a few. And I knowpeople who are enough gravity, whowill look you in the bullseye and say:this is how to stay, this is how to live.But here are their hands, tugging ontothe rainline from their eyes calling Godfrom the other end as if…
Two Poems by Jan Wiezorek

Uphill Uphill disorients us,our gnarly breathing,not knowing howher sentiment loadsher florid face, rotatingunder leaves succumbedto false serenity: Had to putmy dog down, she says—like standing on her head,blood rushing to her face,eyes roiling leaves—hillyfootfalls, pausing, no treescomfort her, no words, noquiet, upside lying down.I’m trying not to cry, to bestrong for her; her breathsclimbing (penumbral)…
Two Poems by John Gallaher

A Private Language In the parking lot this afternoon, a woman (mid-60s?) walked downthe row, got into a silver Ford sedan parked next to me,and sat there a bit like she’s really thinking, like she’s contemplatingexistence, working on her thousand-yard stare, as I was loadingmy groceries. Then she got back out, went down a couple…
Fiction Review: Ben Tripp Reads Tom Comitta’s Novel The Nature Book

Some will be familiar with the style of experimental writing found between these covers. “This novel contains no words of my own,” the author ominously portends in the book’s short, explanatory preface. “I have gathered nature descriptions from over three hundred novels and arranged them into a single book.” The aesthetic of collage, or, more…