Author: Heavy Feather
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Book Review: Matt Matros on Outer Sunset, a novel by Mark Ernest Pothier
Jim Finley, following in the tradition of retired high school English teachers everywhere, is always ready to offer his literary insight. Without much prompting, he’ll tell you that, according to Wallace Stevens, “a good poem resolves the tension between sentimentality and seeing things as they truly are.” If only Jim could do the same. The…
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Original Poem: “A Message to Meg, from the Dead of Night” by Joe O’Brien
I’m texting you this anachronisticpainting of our favorite TV characterto remind us what memories feel like I’m following this feed where they mash up old Simpsons gagswith other old Simpsons gags and then mash those up with Sopranos quotesso I might wring every last droplet of joy that I canfrom whatever I can still wrap…
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Original Fiction: “Irish Setter” by Travis Flatt
Mrs. Withers wants to repeat our conversation. Mrs. Withers corners me in the hall. In body language, Mrs. Withers is illiterate. I edge away from Mrs. Withers. “Mrs. Withers” might not be Mrs. Withers’ name, so I’m careful not to call Mrs. Withers “Mrs. Withers.” My father, Mrs. Withers seems to think, and I share…
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A Surreal Prose Poem for Haunted Passages: “Split” by Sayantani Roy
I never get used to this city being stretched and stretched like elastic. New constructions every day. Streets that were open and wide, now like canyons. The sun glinting off and dying on boxy buildings. Everything looks the same. America the bland. Every day I leave my box and return to it. The only green…
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“What Can Be Said Now”: Karin Falcone Krieger Reviews Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, essays by Suzanne Roberts
At AWP, due to a last-minute cancellation, Suzanne Roberts was asked to fill in on a panel featuring writers who were accomplished at the writing their own lives in books, not one-off memoirs but multiple books. She said she and her husband rented out their house to collect California sized rent. They were temporarily living…
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A Review of Jon Roemer’s Novel Five Windows by Carl Fuerst
Most of Jon Roemer’s Five Windows happens in a San Francisco apartment that’s been stripped of its ceiling and walls. In this space that feels like a black box theatre, the book’s unnamed narrator interacts with a handful of characters, mostly from a distance. From these sparse elements, Roemer constructs a thoroughly fascinating and sometimes…
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Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, a new poetry collection by Maya C. Popa, reviewed by Shannon Nakai
“I can’t undo all I have done to myself, / what I have let an appetite for love do to me.” So opens the staggering latest collection of Maya C. Popa’s poetry, eloquently titled Wound is the Origin of Wonder. Such an opening couplet would suggest a poem of betrayal or unrequited love, but rather…
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New Flash Fiction for Side A: “Neighbor Girls” by Niles Baldwin
Neighbor Girls The mother before there were her babies was a child. Before she brought the world her daughter and son, she could remember being born. The first memory after being born was seeing a woman with a person in her belly. She remembered that belly person born too. They grew up together, neighbor girls.…
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Bad Survivalist Original Short Story: “Eating Ass and Getting Eaten” by Aaron Timms
The bikers pass my apartment every afternoon, rising and falling in their seats like dolphins stitching through the waves. I observe them from my window, moved each time by the acrobatics, the revved wheelies and breakaways, the marriage of these swaddled bodies to the howling machines. My line of sight stretches down a long straight…
Heavy Feather Review 