Author: Heavy Feather

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…
“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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Flash Fiction for Side A: “The Short History of the Long Road” by Harsimran Kaur

The Short History of the Long Road Some called you golden. Golden as in Kintsugi. Kintsugi as in America. America as in Dear America, what else could you give us? Giving as in holding hands at Thanksgiving and singing a prayer in praise of all the thank yous you’ve garnered over all the seconds in…
Breakfast in Fur, a poetry collection by Jessica Murray, reviewed by Beth McDermott

In a world no longer quiet with belief, Breakfast in Fur, Jessica Murray’s debut collection of poetry, refuses to entertain naïve assumptions by imparting a sense that what peace there was, has been obliterated. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes, “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking…
A Haunted Passages Short Story by Rick White: “Memo from the Beyond”

To: Rickety White (that’s a stupid name) From: Afterlife communications dept. Re: ghost of dead father Dictated but not read. Well now, not long to go until the littlun arrives. You must be very excited. One thing that’s probably worth mentioning—don’t be surprised if you start seeing your dead dad from time to time. You…