Author: Heavy Feather
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“The Ritual,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Paul Rousseau
The sky was unflinching judgment, set ablaze. Holy shades of red and yellow in acrylic smears. Clouds scrambled to hide behind treetops where they could peek through branches and parted leaves. Night was close. The lights were about to dim. I was getting some final jumpers in at the elementary school playground just down the…
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Brontosaurus Illustrated, a graphic novel by Leanne Grabel, reviewed by Cathy Smith
A violent kidnapping and rape at the age of nineteen created a Brontosaurus-sized trauma in Leanne Grabel’s life. In the accordingly-titled Brontosaurus Illustrated, she tells her tale in vivid words and drawings to explain how this trauma has lived with her for more than fifty years. Though slightly fictionalized, every single word of this book…
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Poetry: Two Scores from The Future by Willa Carroll
Score for the Body as Last Frontier Poachers prize the rosette pelt | bones are gold | on the black market | I put on the body | of this snow leopard | my eyes behind hers | scanning terrain | We pant across borders | Russia Mongolia China Tibet | Plush paws | doing…
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Flavor Town USA: Three Poems by Paul Siegell
SENDER. Kirwyn, some white space: A driver delivered our meal-kits on Saturday & I read your book to my wife last night while she fixed one for dinner. The transformation from raw to redaction. Only to transform again. There’s this pendulum we ride: When she works a 7a-to-7p at the hospital, I’m on eats. A…
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Book Review: Francois Bereaud on Faith, a novel by Itoro Bassey
Nigeria is a vast country with a rich literary heritage. Award winning authors including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have influenced writers and readers across the globe. Now, with her debut novel Faith, the Nigerian-American writer Itoro Bassey announces herself as one of the next voices in this powerful tradition.…
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A-Sides: Six Poems after Bill Evans by Mark Lamoureux
Re: Person I Knew for Chris McCreary Chasm crier cryall day long outsidethe jewelry store. Hand models with skullrings pluck heart stringsstretched taut by two poleswith drawn-on lightning bolts. Ears’ chic cry Mr.Knowalittlebit abouta thing called lovelornnostalgia for an old-school’s out for summer; get your whitechocolate skull crushed by Korybantesat low noon, beside the bladed gills…
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“Frenzy of material, frenzy of discharge!”: A Review of Zoe Darsee’s Poetry Chapbook Bell Logic by Maxwell Rabb
Music is ornamented by the caesura; by the muted punctures that impel the audience to imagine deprivation. The song’s melody is impeded, and for a moment, there is disorder. Immediately stopping a song’s melodic momentum, the listener is propelled into silence, but the song moves forward, unabated by the composer’s predestined pauses. In sequence, the…
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“Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall”: Michael Quinn Reviews Come Thunder by Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Like flashes of lightning, the 62 poems in Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Come Thunder illuminate pivotal moments in a long life that reveal meaning in the seemingly mundane. Told in the first person by a woman named Barbara, they use plain language and striking images to explore the speaker’s evolution: how the little girl becomes a…
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Bad Survivalist Poetry: “The Dark Knight Contemplates the Metaphysics of Pleasure” by Raza Ijaz
“You’ll leave me?” —Bruce to Alfred, The Dark Knight Rises What is pleasure, I think, as I beat up this goon of Bane. (I’ve been thinking a lot these days, as I beat people up, since Alfred kept his word and left). Is pleasure something I felt when I first started beating this deadbeat thug,…
Heavy Feather Review 