Author: Heavy Feather

Four Cloud Visuals by Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, multimedia artist, and the author of 36 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel, Yiddish for Pirates, was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award (in fiction and in French translation), and won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Nothing…
Peter J. Kahn Talks to Poet & Artist Hosho McCreesh about His New Collection Psalms from the Badlands

The Hebrew psalms were songs of lament, a crying out for help, or hymns praising God. Hosho McCreesh, in his new book Psalms from the Badlands (DrunkSkull Books), loosely follows the tradition of the latter and fills his pages with hymns that praise not necessarily God but life and the land on which life flourishes,…
Novel Excerpt: “Struck” from Afterlife by Angela Woodward

In this luminous novel, Angela Woodward chronicles the meaning of death, the illusions of truth, and the strange, shimmering persistence of the self beyond the ordinary boundaries of life. Through fictional encyclopedia entries, surreal vignettes, and personal narratives, Afterlife blurs fact and imagination, the material and the ghostly, with poetic precision and biting wit. Woodward’s speaker journeys…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Vi Khi Nào & Lily Hoàng’s Collection Timber & Lua

Timber & Lua is a book of ten short stories, stories whose plots follow the logic of dreams rather than the logic of waking life. For example, several of the stories chart the relationship between a woman and her boyfriend, who tries to please her by turning into a small dog. The stories are formally…
“Finals”: A Short Story for Bad Survivalist by Tobenna Nwosu

Time once blew against our march to adulthood, now it stands so still we have to carry it. Chuba huffs ahead, face redder than fanned coal, shoulders slack, past strands that streak dew on our shirts, past the silence ruffled by desertion. A strip of cloud shadows us like we’re sheep grazing astray, munching farther…
Fiction from the Future: “The Passenger” by Michael Sheehan

Caleb came at his appointed time but was surprised there was a line, there was a crowd, a disentangling order of people pressing toward the barrier. Stupidly he’d thought the offworld opportunity, now that it had finally come, would be something cleaner: he’d show at his time, be screened, show his repopulation report and pass,…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Magic of Certainty” by Kim Farleigh

Orville, prostate on a Jeep’s hood under a blaze of stars, aimed his gun at imaginary targets. A print of his wife’s last email dropped from the hood onto the desert’s sand. Orville’s typical scowl became a mean grimace after reading: “Don’t be angry now, but I’m in love with Denzel and we’re going to…
New Haunted Passages Short Story: “Abattoir” by Sofia Mosqueda

I imagine my husband as a shrike. This bird eats what he impales, wood splintering, his tree decorated with flesh. They immortalize death when they hang their prey on spines or barbed wire, feverishly pecking at their bodies for days, but their meat is never enough. At night, my husband wakes me by resting his…
Book Review: Dan Campion Reads Marc Vincenz’s Collection No More Animal Poems

Before looking into No More Animal Poems I happened to read Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s Emily Dickinson and Adam Nicolson’s Bird School. Wolff’s meticulous readings of Dickinson sharpened my alertness to Vincenz’s intricate system of wordplays and allusions. Nicolson’s masterly and conventional observations of the natural world gave me a foil to Vincenz’s equivalently masterly and…