Author: Heavy Feather

“The Posthuman Realist”: An Interview with Steve Tomasula by Marcus Pactor

Steve Tomasula is a literary pioneer of both prose and page design. Those designs transform the vast depth of his cultural and scientific research into uniquely satisfying aesthetic experiences of our historical, present-day, and future worlds. His new novel, Ascension, features research notes, drawings of real and hypothetical creatures, and a variety of online links…
Two Bad Survivalisms by Zedekiah Gonsalves Schild

Good in a Crisis I can elevate that glassfoot above your heartapply unflinching pressure to that chain of woundsthat began with bitter cactus rind balm for the sun. I am good in a crisis a Swiss army knifeof bullshit I know / the plastic seat of a squad car feels likeit has space for cuffs…
Fugitive Assemblage, a novel by Jennifer Calkins, reviewed by Dave Karp

Jennifer Calkins’ Fugitive Assemblage is a prose-poetic narrative of a female narrator’s quest, always “on the wrong track,” to flee from present trauma and painful memory onto the roads of California, roads she will travel to both figuratively and literally bury what she has lost. The narrator surreptitiously flees the hospital, an IV in her…
Fox Henry Frazier: Three Mermaid Poems from The Future

Silver-Eyed Lilínabalén and Adam of the Red Soil Shared the First Pull & Fall of Earthly Promise By land, I saw his core transformedin daily toil russet-smudged ordained mortal scorch iron stains & aches,known, he said, to man alone. We soaked in evening glow, orange orb dippingpast horizon. Lowering home. Night would rinse him clean,…
Dream of Me as Water, a poetry collection by David Ly, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko

There is a disorienting quality to Dream of Me as Water, David Ly’s sophomore poetry collection. The ethereality of water and blueness permeate Ly’s poems, which resist cohesive thematic groupings, although each section does have a sense of adding to what came before, as evident by their titles: “Dream,” “Dream of Me,” and “Dream of…
Haunted Passages: Five Poems by Howie Good

App-athetic (1) Strange how you arrive with no address in mind. Objects begin to misbehave, clocks to bend and stretch. And then a procession of pallbearers carrying empty coffins enters—creased, stained, stoop-shouldered. The century feels a lot longer than a hundred years. (2) Facebook announces a suicide prevention app. If the heart stops beating, it…
“Gonzo Dante”: Jesse Hilson on Garth Miró’s Novel The Vacation

Garth Miró’s novel The Vacation is rollicking, obscene fun with large veins of noxious social satire laced throughout. When a heroin-addicted, dissatisfied social climber joins a cruise in the Caribbean with his high-society European wife for a momentous time that could end in their divorce, or worse, they find themselves entering the corridors of an inescapable new…
Nympholepsy, a collaborative writing by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein & Lisa Marie Basile, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I hope the following statement will come across in the spirit in which it’s intended (i.e. not too pervy) but I have always had a soft spot for stories about female adolescence. Not necessarily the fun ones—though I did once read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in a single, delightful sitting—so much as the emotionally…
Erotic: New & Selected, a poetry collection by Alexis Rhone Fancher, reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

Dangerous. Transgressive. In Erotic: New & Selected, Alexis Rhone Fancher brings together two previous collections, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen (2014) and Enter Here (2017), with new photos and poems all focused on sex. It’s not just a story of one couple, one betrayal, one ménage-a-trois. Erotic: New & Selected is a…