Author: Heavy Feather

“And Then What”: A Review of Julia Guez’s The Certain Body by Eric David Helms

“The dark is very dark,” Guez writes in “Still Life When All Our Symptoms Seem to Have Symptoms of Their Own,” a poem folded within The Certain Body, a collection which, over a span of three sections, examines the brave new world of grief and isolation during quarantine. With a tongue that combines “moon blood…
Short Fiction: “Adrift” by Max Wheeler

Like so much in Hassan’s long life, this transition was something done to him, not by him. My mom sounded resigned when she called me the night before my monthly visit. Her husband had been changing in small ways for a while already. “Look, honey. I have to tell you something.” I could tell she’d…
Two Poems by Julian Mithra

Marooned by Organs[1] hooee bighorn or prongbucki’m fat for backs hunched against arctic. Beacham’s offcollecting buffalo pies to hold back toothache pain, a furrow for hide-hunters to finger when we runout of bulletsand spit hormone circles, panting, free rangethrough rabbitbrush lungsand cliffrose kidneys gait, the kind of country broken by ditches and ravinesand canteringas hard as anything bloodsoak,…
“An Absence You Recognize”: A Prose Poem by Radha Kai Zan

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Radha Kai Zan creates stories across different mediums. As a visual artist, they indulge in the aberrant and sensual, centering often on the body and its mutable, mortal nature. As a writer, their fiction skews towards the speculative with a particular interest in exploring the macabre, erotic,…
Review: Patrick Parks on Man in a Cage, a novel by Patrick Nevins

In novels about Africa, the continent often serves as a moral landscape where imperialistic intruders degrade, defile, and attempt to destroy the cultures of people who have lived there for thousands of years. The fervent missionaries, unscrupulous capitalists, ambitious anthropologists of those books may not share a single reason for their interventions, but all do…
Don’t Look at Me, a new novel by Charles Holdefer, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington

Charles Holdefer has lived in Europe for over forty years, mostly in France and Belgium, yet his fiction most often returns him to his native Midwestern U.S. In his latest novel, Don’t Look at Me, the main character is a six-foot nine-inch ex-basketball star and Masters’ student in Literature named Holly Winegarten. Holdefer, who is mainly…
Side A Visual Poetry: “bye, see you soon” by Jonathan Memmert

bye, see you soon bye,see yousoon maybebefore you knowit one of us will run across each others pathsanother day another nighttime, is any of it guaranteed?next time, old phrase built to lastthe trick is not to let it get to you toomuch as we exist in a work in progressa sleight of hand each unfolding…
“A Hallucinatory Clarity”: Marcus Pactor in Conversation with Angela Woodward

Angela Woodward works both unlikely and widely known history into her slim fictions. In her new novel, Ink, she weaves together (among other things) the origin of PDFs, the transcripts of Abu Ghraib detainee testimonies, the life and work of Francis Ponge, and the strangely moving lives of typists. The result offers a brief, memorable…
Miriam Gershow: “Nature Stories,” a new nonfiction for Bad Survivalist

1. The GPS gets us lost on the way to the boat launch. We backtrack and I take out Google Maps on my phone. We argue, but familiarly. My husband says he’ll know it by sight. I tell him when he’s on the wrong road, but get left mixed up with right. Turn here, I…