Author: Heavy Feather

Side A Poem: “A Fierce Menagerie” by Janet McAdams

A Fierce Menagerie On October 17, 2011, Terry Thompson released his menagerieof 56 exotic animals from his Zanesville, Ohio, farm.While a handful of animals were recovered,the majority were shot by local law enforcement. 1.The Next-to-Last Zanesville Tiger How many ways to enter the tiger’s body. This one bred downthe generations and so prized for its…
Fiction Review: Joe Sacksteder Reads The Prodigious Earth by Eric Blix

Eric Blix’s incandescent novel, The Prodigious Earth, is divided into three sections, “The City,” “Old World,” and “Ruin,” an ABA format in which the third section picks up the first’s characters and plots, as well as its structure of very short numbered chapters, many of which are appropriated quotations from such figures as Teddy Roosevelt,…
“Strange Juxtapositions”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Babak Lakghomi

Babak Lakghomi’s disturbing fiction builds intensity and paranoia with its constant suggestion of growing but never-fully-seen darkness stalking beneath the muscular prose. His latest work, South, is a strangely seductive dystopian novel. In it, a journalist named B. is asked to report on labor strife in a distant region of his country. But his interviews…
“The Physics of Pain”: A Reading of Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche by Andrew Felsher

Vi Khi Nao’s most recent memoir, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, arrived for me as a mathematical task. It was January of this year. I was in an airport in Finland on an eleven-hour layover en route to see Yehui, my partner, who had been in China for the past six months to…
New Side A Poem by Annalisa Hansford: “Last Night, I Had a Nightmare That My Elementary School, Along with My Childhood Memories, Caught on Fire”

Last Night, I Had a Nightmare That My Elementary School, Along with My ChildhoodMemories, Caught on Fire Golden Shovel of “Televangelism” by K-Ming Chang A few hours ago, I dreamt of my childhood burning in prayers. When noone was looking, grief lit a match behind my elementary school. Oneghost licked the place until it smoked…
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…
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…
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…
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…