Author: Heavy Feather

Buffalo Girl, a new poetry collection by Jessica Q. Stark, reviewed by Raye Hendrix

Jessica Q. Stark’s newest collection of poems, Buffalo Girl, is a fairytale—but not the kind that makes you feel good in the end. That isn’t to say this collection is not wonderful (it is) but Stark’s pseudo-mythological reckoning with violence, racism, motherhood, and questions of home aren’t meant to comfort. These are not the fables…
The Salt Line, a 2014 novel by Youval Shimoni, reviewed by Yaron Peleg

Youval Shimoni’s 2014 novel, The Salt Line, presents us with an intriguing literary paradox: a story about myths that questions the search for meaningful stories, and an epic novel written in a postmodern age of perishable texts and shortening attention span. Two myths stand at the center of the novel, one fabricated the other implied.…
“On Unholy Melodies”: Bunkong Tuon Remembers the Poet Ted Jonathan

Goddammit, Ted. You’re gone. And you left us with an unfinished manuscript. NYQ editor Raymond Hammond and poet Tony Gloeggler put together a fine collection in your memory, Unholy Melodies: New and Collected, which includes your three previously published books and the final manuscript, the titular Unholy Melodies. They did an honorable job. NYQ Books…
Flavor Town USA: Four Poems by James Miller

On the Beach Tonight we’re driving along the South Shore, looking for a party to crash. Adjunct hell, frayed Spanish grammar— but Stevie prefers his Iberian cheeses. Dairy farmers steep their rounds in caves up north, he tells me. Slots carved in stone, cabrales throbbing in the dark. Does the mold think, or dream? Tendrils…
“Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t,” a Side A prose poem by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t Maybe not missing is forgiving and missing is holding on, the way I can taste and smell Teaberry when I miss unwrapping a pack of that gum; I miss the first day of school as a kid, a just-bought outfit laid out on my made-bed like an…
The Scarecrow Alibis, poems by Denver Butson, reviewed by Yolanda Pena Wright

In his fifth book, The Scarecrow Alibis, Denver Butson articulates the strangeness of being human in a manner befitting one of the best contemporary poets today—from the perspective of a scarecrow. The work contained in this book might be the poetic anthem of multiple generations whose longings transcend time and space. It’s possessed, with haunting…
“I Have No Master, Whilst I Have No Clue”: An Interview with Zak Ferguson by Patrick Parks

Zak Ferguson describes himself as “an autistic experimental author, living in Brighton, UK, and co-founder (along with fiancée Laura-Jane Marshall) of the innovative, boundary-pushing Sweat Drenched Press.” In addition to his editorial duties—which include everything from reading submissions to formatting the books to designing the covers—he spends his spare time reviewing books and films for…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Runoff” by Alexander Fredman

I learned to wait for rain. I learned to smell sickness in tinny bits of trash. I stuck my face in the trash. I inhaled. I split for some new terror. I dreamed of ways to evade capture. I evaded capture. I began all my sentences with I. Then I decided not to. Who was…
Original Side A Essay: “On the Boulder” by David Capps

On the Boulder Begin with the proposition that the boulder is not a mountain. That you are not so relatively small. The proposition that the boulder is not a mountain locates itself in space where the body is: arms reaching, fingers outstretched, toes secured in familiar footholds; familiarity through the matter of scale. The proposition…