Author: Heavy Feather

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…
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.…
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…
“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…
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…
Side A List Poem: “Palm Oil by Any Other Name …” by Kyle Heger

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Poetry: Four Sonnets by Brendan Lorber

I believe in science and also Who gets closer the further they get? Everyone believes in science and alsowhy time calls itself a spell The magic of returning to morning consciousnessis that we do when the reason we do is super unavailable until much later and is often the answer a spider trapped in larger spider’s…
Book Review: Adam Camiolo on Rick White’s Story Collection Talking to Ghosts at Parties

“Arriving last of all he stands on the periphery of the melee, just slightly out of reach of the fun. The same way he’ll stand at so many parties when he gets older.” Good flash fiction is best thought of as a meal. The required ingredients are simple: a lure, speed, a surprise, and set…
“The Selenomancer’s Moods”: S.G. Mallett on Reading by the Light of Maureen Alsop’s Poetry Collection Pyre

You probably won’t play the haruspex, as the interlocutor reveals the noumena via their mode of inquiry but is rendered too distanced to be biographical; you will play the attendant through aisles, the ciphers above the doors on your walk through Maureen Alsop’s imaginary garden with incantatory toads in them. Whereas Mirror Inside Coffin traces…