Author: Heavy Feather

We Are Mermaids, poems by Stephanie Burt, reviewed by Robin Arble

There’s a moment in Stephanie Burt’s newest collection I’ve read so many times I memorized it by accident. In “Love Poem with Summer Camp Reunion,” the huge and frightening freedom of camp has given the poet enough distance from her life—from helpful but clueless parents, from treacherous hallways and classrooms, cafeterias and blacktops—to encounter her…
Side A Hybrid Piece: “Early People” by Jeffrey Hermann

Early People Early people looked at stars and just had no idea. Then someone had an idea. They drew it on a cave wall with a burnt stick. Meanwhile, I’m eating Sun Chips from a machine. If I had to explain the world to paleolithic humans I’d take them someplace quiet and wait for an…
“shattered,” a poem by Carina Solis

it’s like we’re flickering, burst lamplights smirking in the dark. faces gaunt, we lounge on a half-shaded stairway, the moon and its smile hanging over our emptiness, crooked as burnt cigarettes. we pant smoke into the horizon and watch haze cut into our skin: all we taste is desperation. in the play of our lives, the night is a blackened man with…
Fiction: “My Dinner with a Thief” by David Luntz

I was looking for something for my wife I couldn’t afford. That’s when I first saw her. A younger-looking version of my wife. A customer had left a diamond brooch on the glass top and she pocketed it like a Three-card Monte pro. Her gray eyes clocked mine and said: No one likes a snitch.…
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…