Author: Heavy Feather

Flavor Town USA Nonfiction: “Little Bird Tongues” by Richie Zaborowske

The preparation of the ortolan bunting songbird is steeped in booze, gruesome tradition, and taboo. The tiny birds are captured alive and forced into blackout cages filled with grain. Similar to a clandestine midnight kitchen gorging, the lack of light disorients the birds and they feed until they nearly double in size. The overstuffed birds…
“In the White American Light”: Amy K. Bell Reviews Barbara Tomash’s Poetry Collection Her Scant State

In her newest book, Her Scant State, poet and visual artist Barbara Tomash presents an erasure of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady which, through its inventive formal procedure, illuminates asyntactical, nonlinear, almost stray activations by which we gain meaning. Tomash lifts the voices, ideas, and violences which animated James’ 1881 novel in order…
Haunted Passages: “Pursued by a Line of Three Ducks,” a poem by Gregory Crosby

One day, you will have no choice but to walk,the punctured tire of these times behind youon a road brimming with sunlight & dust. The clarity of movement, followed byexhaustion. The clarity of exhaustion.Your feet hurt, & you can’t hear the river. The only question is whether you area refugee or a tourist. Or dead.They…
Buffalo Girl, a new poetry collection by Jessica Q. Stark, reviewed by Raye Hendrix

Jessica Q. Stark’s newest collection of poems, Buffalo Girl, is a fairytale—but not the kind that makes you feel good in the end. That isn’t to say this collection is not wonderful (it is) but Stark’s pseudo-mythological reckoning with violence, racism, motherhood, and questions of home aren’t meant to comfort. These are not the fables…
The Salt Line, a 2014 novel by Youval Shimoni, reviewed by Yaron Peleg

Youval Shimoni’s 2014 novel, The Salt Line, presents us with an intriguing literary paradox: a story about myths that questions the search for meaningful stories, and an epic novel written in a postmodern age of perishable texts and shortening attention span. Two myths stand at the center of the novel, one fabricated the other implied.…
“On Unholy Melodies”: Bunkong Tuon Remembers the Poet Ted Jonathan

Goddammit, Ted. You’re gone. And you left us with an unfinished manuscript. NYQ editor Raymond Hammond and poet Tony Gloeggler put together a fine collection in your memory, Unholy Melodies: New and Collected, which includes your three previously published books and the final manuscript, the titular Unholy Melodies. They did an honorable job. NYQ Books…
Flavor Town USA: Four Poems by James Miller

On the Beach Tonight we’re driving along the South Shore, looking for a party to crash. Adjunct hell, frayed Spanish grammar— but Stevie prefers his Iberian cheeses. Dairy farmers steep their rounds in caves up north, he tells me. Slots carved in stone, cabrales throbbing in the dark. Does the mold think, or dream? Tendrils…
“Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t,” a Side A prose poem by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t Maybe not missing is forgiving and missing is holding on, the way I can taste and smell Teaberry when I miss unwrapping a pack of that gum; I miss the first day of school as a kid, a just-bought outfit laid out on my made-bed like an…
The Scarecrow Alibis, poems by Denver Butson, reviewed by Yolanda Pena Wright

In his fifth book, The Scarecrow Alibis, Denver Butson articulates the strangeness of being human in a manner befitting one of the best contemporary poets today—from the perspective of a scarecrow. The work contained in this book might be the poetic anthem of multiple generations whose longings transcend time and space. It’s possessed, with haunting…