Author: Heavy Feather

“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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2022

I’m a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create a list of suggestions from authors who share my penchant for more experimental or innovative…
Review: “An Emphasis on Origins in Figment by Leila Chatti” by Morgan English

Leila Chatti’s new work Figment is a book-length poem which loosely takes the form of an abecedarian. The alphabet acts as a guide through the associative, musical leaps Chatti makes from page to page. We first see the alphabet pushing the book along with: “amorphous / blank // belief be / lie con / ceive…
“Take-Out,” an original fiction by Kip Knott for Flavor Town USA

Sometimes Clay can’t believe he still lives in the house he grew up in. His dad still lives there, too. Clay and his dad have been hearing a strange sound in the house for well over a month now. They hear it in the morning as they guzzle cups of Taster’s Choice and nosh on…
“The Painting and the Parrot,” a Haunted Passages flash by David Luntz

I wrote this story once about a guy who kills his best friend. Well, he wasn’t really his friend at the time. They used to be friends. I don’t want to give too much away in case the story gets published. But at the end of the story the guy’s staring at this painting his…