Author: Heavy Feather

Book Review: Adam Camiolo on Boundless as the Sky by Dawn Raffel

“You need humans to do what humans can’t do.” Dawn Raffel’s newest work of compact prose and deep imagination, titled Boundless as the Sky, is a sincerely humane response to one of postmodernism’s most abstract masterpieces. It’s a powerful story. The book is a web of vignettes directly patterned after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and…
Call Me Spes, poems by Sara Cahill Marron, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington

Some poets settle into a voice and use it over and over again. But in her new book, Call Me Spes, Sara Cahill Marron admirably experiments with another kind of poetry altogether different from her previous, more lyrical book, Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here. Born in Virginia but currently living in New York, her work…
Poetry: “Sky Burial” by Summer J. Hart

In my dream about water, I hover over a starless nothing, refusing to go in. Refusing to let tomorrow turn out like today. Sky broke. White plate. Picking porcelain out of the carpet. The phone rings. Rain churns the southwest corner of the basement into mud. In my dream about water, the waves swallow the…
“Play Thief,” a Side A poem by Adam Stutz

Play Thief I catch the poison too early this morningcatch the eroticism of sloth a voluptuous fog sweeping in dousing narratives absence tense pressed into relief like a dysfunctional search engine pronoun I correct the overcorrections + keep correctingcorresponding to faulty focus pressing on lenseslike I should be elsewhere I slap on labels to…
Fiction for Side A: “Thirty-Nine Bye-Byes” by Martin Kleinman

Thirty-Nine Bye-Byes 39. “You should see him.” 2. The phone call came while I was stuck in traffic on the Central Park transverse, the Met’s Temple of Dendur off to my right. A nurse from my father’s hospital equivocated her way through the call. My dad had been in failing health. “Where are you now?” she…
“The Creative Use of Reality”: Peter Valente on Mark Alice Durant’s Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera

While reading Mark Alice Durant’s loving portrait of Maya Deren, I was reminded of all the days and nights I spent as a teenager at Anthology Film Archives where I saw all of Maya Deren’s films. She was important to me when I started making short experimental films with a small point and-shoot Canon camera.…
The Wake and the Manuscript, a novel by Ansgar Allen, reviewed by Adnan Bayyat

The Wake and the Manuscript is a literary artifact pronouncing and protesting the inherent toxicity of education from cradle to grave. The brooding thesis, expounded through the prism of quasi-fiction, holds that “to become educated is to become sick.” Education purportedly “takes the fabric of life and tears it up and shits it out.” This…
Fiction from The Future: “The Freewheeling Bicycle Coast” by Perry Genovesi

In which the people of the Coast realize that the new way of walking was so much like how a bicycle coasts, that when they even looked at the bicycle parts in their refuse bins, they wondered why it had taken them so long to discover. ᐧᐧᐧᐧ Before we met Delilah, we all suffered the…
Side A Visual Poetry: “Autoimmunity” by Allison Thung

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes.[1] Mini-interview with Allison Thung HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? AT: A moment that particularly stands out to me is when I stumbled into the world of contemporary literary journals, discovered a category of publications (present company…