Author: Heavy Feather

“An Angry Bull Loose in a Video Store”: Jesse Hilson Reviews Steve Gergley’s Novel Skyscraper

Anyone who has shown up for a new job at a large, intricate organization and tried to get their bearings in the workplace will be able to relate to the germ of the idea behind Steve Gergley’s new novel Skyscraper. A 23-year-old man named Dan Simmons’s would like to play video games and watch action…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “How Close Is It?” by Darlene Eliot

Night driving was easy. He knew what to do with a windy mountain pass, a straight shot through cornfields, a detour around streets too narrow for an eighteen-wheeler. He knew what to do when the moon disappeared behind checkpoints and his headlights were the only light on the road. He knew what to do when…
Side A: “Night” a poem by Brenton Booth

Night She says she has been thinking a lot about killing herself. How everything would be much easier then. She has tears in her eyes she can’t control, I know she isn’t lying. I think of our first date. Wandering around the Botanical Gardens just before it closed for the night. There was an exhibition…
“To Not Get Crystallized into Habits and Things”: Jacob Smullyan in Conversation with Paolo Pergola

Paolo Pergola is the author of Passaggi—avventure di un autostoppista (Rides: The Adventures of a Hitchhiker) (Exorma, 2013) and Attraverso la finestra di Snell (Through Snell’s Window) (Italo Svevo Edizione, 2019). His work has appeared in several Italian literary magazines. He is a member of OPLEPO/Opificio di Letteratura Potenziale (Workshop of Potential Literature), Italy’s equivalent of France’s OULIPO. He…
“self-evident and completely incomprehensible”: Austin Miles on Evan Isoline’s Insensible Text DƐVDMVTH

Insensibility invokes an opening. What’s insensible is ungriddable, unseizable, or unknown, even in plain sight. The inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, writing on insensible nature, says that it is “that which appropriates sense without being sensible to appropriation.” She draws on Georges Bataille’s notion of insensibility: “a form of animality which opens up a depth that…
Poetry: “First Act of a Movie Where I Loved You the Entire Time” by Angela Sun

for dad ESTABLISHING SHOT. Flowers purpling in the dying light like fingers. Our house flushed with the smell of something sweet. IN THE HALLWAY. You, walking into the shape of this silence— white as bones in the lightning of cracks on the soles of your shoes Where are you? This place smuggles echoes into the…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “Phantasmagossip whispered to me between planes, our bodies awake to our mirrored shapes, our ears to the palm of the same bed frame” by Sara Mae

A curve of eyeliner on each side like my sight itself was in brackets, he approached as if to examine me as if to kiss me & remind me what I owed, my heels over the edge of the porch, as above so below, leaving with clowny orange eyeshadow under lower lashes, Persephon-y, & after…
Beasts of 42nd Street, a new novel by Preston Fassel, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I didn’t pick up my first Stephen King—The Shining—until 2016, but boy did he buy up a ton of early real estate in my young mind. An eight-year-old screening of the edited-for-TV Kubrick film was basically my intro to horror as a concept, and my favorite aunt and uncle were King superfans. I still remember…
“Winter” by Jesse Lee Kercheval: A Graphic Narrative for Haunted Passages

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Her graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review and appeared in the Los Angeles Review and the Superstition Review. Her latest book is the poetry collection, I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).