Author: Heavy Feather

How to Start a Coven, a surrealist fiction chapbook by Deirdre Danklin, reviewed by Stephanie Bohland

Deirdre Danklin’s How to Start a Coven is a collection of haunting flash fiction that takes us through a fever dream of skeletons, banshees, and an ancient earth that hasn’t forgotten magic. This surrealist chapbook is comprised of previously published pieces, all powerful on their own, but it is in bringing together this assortment of…
Shannon Hozinec Reviews Meghan Lamb’s New Novel COWARD

Meghan Lamb’s COWARD opens with a burning sky that smells of blood. This is no harbinger of the apocalypse, however, as one might assume—we are promised that this burning is “natural, […] a part of life”; that it happens every year, and that there is an “other side”—an end—within reach. We need only sit and wait until…
Review: Jody Hobbs Hesler on Lisa Cupolo’s story collection Have Mercy on Us

The ten keenly observed stories in Lisa Cupolo’s award-winning debut collection Have Mercy On Us usher us into a world of strained relationships. Whether in Kenya, Canada, Florida, or California, every character struggles to exert more power than their relationships allow, to matter more than they do—to themselves or to other significant players in their lives. In…
On Joke Architecture in Elise Houcek’s Tractatus: “FINAL PROOF OF THE ETERNAL SUBJECTIVITY OF LANGUAGE!” by Maxwell Rabb

Words are playthings, and by no means is this trivial. There is an unadulterated joy to constructing language—to cutting up and arranging the pieces. There is suspense, an unalloyed momentum, to the words that endure tangibly in poetry. Unfortunately, language is frequently inundated by a deluge of abstractions, forcing the simple pleasure of words to…
Side A Poem: “Every Minute Is a Minute” by John Leo

Every Minute Is a Minute The invoice is ready for review.Download and attach the backup documents.Add the 14% fuel charge, plus energy feeequal to 10% of transportation costs.Initial and date. The invoice is readyfor review by a third party. In the den, you have received a request for bibliographicalinformation. Review the requested resource.Apply the article…
Flavor Town USA: Three Poems by Rachel Becker

morning sickness the world hasan atmospheric stenchthat turns yourstomach cyclonicfor the fullnine months. other mothers-to-beoffer advice,but there’s no wayto white chicken meator preggo popyourself out of bed,or to short circuityour brain’smaladaptive mishmashof wires. a glitchthat renders toxic aluminum, toilet bowl,skin cream, stove topthe stench of water. your baby at 12 weeksis a photo of a…
“All Was Lost”: Robert Crooke Reviews Men in My Situation, a novel by Per Petterson

A real-life tragedy haunts this beautiful, touchingly honest novel by celebrated Norwegian author Per Petterson. The event in question is a fire that in 1990 destroyed the Scandinavian Star ferryboat during an overnight voyage between Norway and Denmark. This profound catastrophe, which claimed the lives of 159 passengers—including Petterson’s parents, a brother, and a nephew—has…
“If There’s a Window—a New Possibility”: Allison Wyss Talks to Mary Lynn Reed

Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician—but I’ve learned she’s also a photographer, shark-level pool player, and ace bowler. Her debut collection Phantom Advances has a bit of all that. It’s a deep exploration of questions of identity, sexuality, and gender—with a sharp focus and a lot of heart. She and I talked…
“I Cherish the Act of Sentencing”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen is one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists. Few writers have been as consistently excellent over the past thirty-plus years. In that time, he has evolved from a cutting-edge sci-fi writer into a wizard of form and narrative, infusing his singular works with poetically imaginative language as well as a…