Author: Heavy Feather
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Haunted Passages New Fiction: “Originality” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
I finish my story; I’m very proud of it, but I’m sure there are some loose parts that need tightening, or my ending could be less metafictional, so I bring it to workshop to get that little bit of feedback it needs. But instead of telling me how brilliant my characterizations happen to be, Kate…
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No Land’s Man, an impossible travel memoir by Lisa Carver, reviewed by Ric Royer
In the preface for her newest book, No Land’s Man, Lisa Carver says of herself: “I wander through life … getting lost and losing things and forgetting things and breaking things and tripping on nothing. It’s a miracle I’ve survived this far.” This turns out to be a useful disclaimer for the energetic, capricious, and…
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Original Bad Survivalist Short Story: “The Mall” by Duncan Rivers
“Die in a field and tell me what rots first, you or your clothes. When the crows swoop down from the peaks of the barns they roost on, where will their beaks be persuaded to strike? Will it be the nylon handbag you carry over your shoulder, or the sunken eyes that wilt away in…
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Matt L. Roar & Niina Pollari Discuss Their New Poetry Books, MY WAR and Path of Totality
I first read Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality on a plane and was immediately torn between giving into the book, allowing myself to weep my way from JFK to SFO, or to pull myself together and not thoroughly weird-out the passenger in the neighboring seat. Niina’s book is funny and smart and sad and intimate enough…
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Poetry for Haunted Passages: “The Deer Girls” by Janet McAdams
The sisters wear white doeskin dresses and moccasins quilled and beaded, not by their own hands, but by old ladies with fingers toughened by a hundred punctures. They’ll dance through the soles in a single night. This tale has need of a clever young man to find the valley where the twelve sisters go every…
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Two Poems for Flavor Town USA by Anne Panning
The Butter Principle Life is like cold, hard butter. A pebble in your shoe.A stubborn child who won’t release the Snicker bar inthe checkout line. An axe to grind against the iceberg. But.How about that shy, self-deprecating toast burnt black? Theknife hacks away at like it a he-man. But. Cold butter standsup for the underdog.…
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Side A: Kristina Andersson Bicher Reads Poems from Marie Lundquist’s I walk around gathering up my garden for the night
Situating Marie Lundquist Lundquist’s taut, image-driven, aphoristic poems speak in a contemporary voice but nonetheless offer clarity and stillness in a frenetic world. With a gimlet eye, Lundquist considers the essential mysteries of memory, childhood, love, longing, and existence. While the emotional terrain explored is intense, devastating even, Lundquist’s tone remains at arms-length. The voice…
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“Now That the Sky Is a Mall”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews Rewild, a poetry collection by Meredith Stricker
“Ecopoetics trades an Emersonian or Thoreauvian attention to sublime, untouched nature for sites of extraction, chemical spills, and other manifestations of ecosystemic violence.” –Jean Thomas Tremblay In 1990 Jack Collom published his long documentary ecopoem entitled “Passages” about the passenger pigeon, once so numerous “they blotted out the sun,” and their extinction at the hands…
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Collaborative Short Story for Haunted Passages: “Window Well” by Abby Feden & Allie Spikes
There’s a frog ribbitting super diligently outside the basement window. The window looks out into a chicken wire well. Sometimes, after a real wet spell, Maddy will invite us all over to gather at the window and peek out at whatever unlucky thing is stuck at the bottom of the hole. Mostly we see spiders…
Heavy Feather Review 