Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Anders Carlson-Wee’s Second Poetry Collection Disease of Kings

Within the realm of narrative poetry, Anders Carlson-Wee’s second full-length book features two purposefully unemployed, dumpster-diving male best friends, who live at the fringes of American consumer culture in a nondescript apartment, and embody a sort of DIY punk rock esthetic of not working and living off the abundance tossed into dumpsters. Told through characters…
Fiction Review: Shyanne Hamrick Reads There Is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller

Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller’s There Is Only One Ghost in the World may have found life in the middle of a pandemic, but their collaborative book doesn’t steep in the tedium of socially distanced landscapes. These two writers instead tie a balloon to the narrative and gaze at contemporary America from a bird’s-eye view…
Nonfiction for Bad Survivalist: “Unruly Roots” by Morgan Rose-Marie

I’ve tried to make this call four or five times this week. Now that my mother is finally on the other end, I find myself wishing I were once again hearing her voicemail greeting instead. Growing up, when I answered the house phone, the caller would inevitably launch into conversation. “I’m Morgan,” I would interrupt.…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Jenny Grassl

Woman’s Mappa Mundi—The Promontory Imprint a bubbling gone rogue my song summons hounds of heaven there are no sailors to risk sirens sea pig rides the waves my lap subsumes blood chambers of the deep fins of all the fathersa dead man’s float cracked and crashed by a shopping cart ship mast skews vertebrae in…
Bad Survivalist Hybrid by Elissa Fertig: “Thank You for Contacting The Void. Your Scream Is Very Important to Us.”

Private jets emit fourteen times more pollution than commercial airline flights. With all of the flash floods that have been happening in Las Vegas, we are going to erode the topsoil until all that’s left is bedrock. Last night we went to Dorian’s and I had three glasses of white wine and your girlfriend barely…
Book Review: Nadia de Vries on Jeffrey Grunthaner & Kenji Siratori’s Paracelsus’ Trouble with Sundays

If you were to put the Internet on paper, what would it look like? Perhaps this is a redundant question in 2023. The Internet has not been a separate mode of being since at least the early 2000s: it has long permeated everything we think and do. Media theorists like Nathan Jurgenson, Matthew Fuller, and…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “All Four Toothbrushes Have Teeth” by Jo Morrigan Black

All four toothbrushes have teeth, soI mustn’t touch them the toothbrush her ex left behind five months ago hasteeth the shaggy bristled toothbrush with the suction cup has teeth the toothbrush that she held in her mouth yesterday while she texted that she’d like me to come over hasteeth the toothbrush still under plastic has…
Haunted Passages Short Fiction: “No Smiling” by Salvatore Difalco

The room was spartan, of tan and ochre tones, with a medium in white linen seated at a table composed of yellow beeswax. My eyes widened at the sight of a crystal ball placed before her glittering like a small galaxy. It looked like the real thing. A strong smell of cinnamon filled my nostrils.…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joel Death, a novel by B.R. Yeager with illustrations by John Trefry

I love Billy Joel. I will not apologize, for I do not feel shame. When it comes to Billy Joel, I am shameless. I love his attic songs and his streetlife serenades; I love his cold spring harbors and his Summer highland falls. I love him from Oyster Bay Long Island to Soviet Leningrad to…