Author: Heavy Feather
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“Some Membrane to Push Against”: Time, Memory, and Representation in Hayden Church’s So What? by Dustin Cole
Hayden Church’s new poetry collection So What? opens with a more or less perfect short story. “Jackson County War” is narrated by a perceptive three-year-old who describes the razing of his family farm and the slaughtering of its black and white inhabitants by the Great Possums, a powerful Jackson County clan disgruntled by the outcome…
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“What We Leave Behind”: William O’Daly’s Poetry Collection The New Gods Reviewed by Toti O’Brien
With no title poem to ease our way, we wonder who William O’Daly’s New Gods are. Trying to identify them is one of several paths we can borrow as we tread the intricate landscape of his verse. Are they uppercase, lowercase? Singular or multiple? Are they better than the old ones? Are the old ones…
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Two Poems by Anthony Robinson
Failures of the Poets Wyatt couldn’t keep count of his “numbrous vers”And when I mentioned this, a user said, “pronounced properly,They scan perfectly.” They do not, but as a rule,I’ve stopped arguing with old men. The shaggy poems,Derived from an old Italian, have their mincing charms,And for this he did not deserve hanging, nor beheading.It’s unfortunate…
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Book Review: The Anchored World, flash fairy tales and folklore by Jasmine Sawers, reviewed by Stephanie Martin
The Anchored World, Jasmine Sawers’ debut collection, uses flash fiction to reimagine classic Eastern and Western fairy tales and folklore that are often much longer than what Sawers’ has written. However, Sawers not only reimagines fairy tales and folklore; they also invent their own along the way. On the surface, Sawers’ collection seems to answer…
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“A Duality, a Duet”: Reading Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures by Maxx Fidalgo
Described as a “genderbent, queer, biracial modern-retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein,” Addie Tsai delivers on all descriptors. Unwieldy Creatures follows Plum and Dr. Frank, two queer, nonbinary scientists who embark on their journey to play gods and create a human embryo without egg or sperm. In frame stories nestled into each other like Russian…
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The Distortions, stories by Christopher Linforth, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe
In The Distortions, Christopher Linforth transports us to Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina in the aftermath of war. A bit of history to bring the book into focus: when Yugoslavia broke up into six independent countries in the nineties, Serbian nationalism led to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The twelve stories in this collection provoke…
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“The Surreal Rendering of Trauma in Black Wool Cape by Alison Carb Sussman”: A Review by Jessica Purdy
Readers of Black Wool Cape will not be able to look away from Alison Carb Sussman’s surreal, deeply sensitive vision of the world and the part she plays in its histories. If the title Black Wool Cape conjures mysterious images of women on the verge of madness, let it also remind us of the horrors…
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Poetry for Side A: “Like So” by Sharon Mesmer
Like So —after Alfonsina Storni, Argentina, 1892 –1938 1/ I’m reading a book on how to live and wondering if it’s truethat loving someone transfigures everything.I doubt if anyone truly loves.They just infuse all things with themselves and move on. I might grasp the subtle order of existence if I could learnhow some people never…
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Shannon Nakai on Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods
The woods have often served as the storyteller’s theater of magical encounters and warnings. Breadcrumbs, lost trekkers, magic brooks, foreboding creatures—the trappings of the somewhat mystical aura that an uninterrupted primal space lends now hedges a 21st-century rural academic community. Juxtaposing folkloric history against a contemporary college town, Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods…
Heavy Feather Review 