Author: Heavy Feather

“The Possibility of America”: An Interview with Indran Amirthanayagam by John Wall Barger

Born in 1960 in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Indran Amirthanayagam moved to London, England, at eight, and Honolulu at fourteen (where he attended high school with Barack Obama, who was a year younger). He attended Haverford College and then Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In his years working for the U.S. Foreign Service,…
“Go for the Jugular”: James Braun Reviews Campfires of the Dead and the Living by Peter Christopher

Campfires of the Dead: If you know you know. Know the cult-like status this long-out-of-print book has achieved, with original copies running over a hundred bucks on Amazon—or otherwise elsewhere—as of this writing. Know too, maybe, these stories as written under the wing and teachings of Gordon Lish, with an all-in focus on the acoustics…
“Cowboy Koans”: Jesi Buell Reviews Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

When you see a pronghorn antelope from your car, high upnorth in Nevada, by the Walker River Rez, I don’t knowwhat to be, the antelope, the person seeing the antelope,the grass that the antelope is eating, the feeling the person getsfrom seeing the antelope, the feeling the antelope has whileeating the grass, so I try…
Thank You for Being, a poet’s memoir of home by Merle Bachman, reviewed by Marjorie Pryse

In her new book, Thank You for Being, Merle Bachman produces a hybrid work, a prose-poem of sorts. Although the book sketches various locations its poet-narrator has lived or traveled, her real home takes place in words. “Never wanted to be tied down” becomes the mantra of this reflection of a life: no house but…
“The Weight,” a flash nonfiction for Side A by Aleina Grace Edwards

The Weight Eleven Look at you, cutie, you’re all skin and bones! Maya’s mom beams at me and scoops homemade mac and cheese onto my plate. I’m wearing her daughter’s T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts; both are too big for me. I smile back, encouraged. My arms, always too long for my body, move…
“Each Drop Is Its Own Light”: Tiffany Troy in Conversation with Dara Barrois/Dixon about Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of the Wave Books titles In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, Reverse Rapture, and also in 2022 two new chapbooks, Two Poems from Scram Press and NINE from Incessant Pipe. She’s received awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim…
Maze Poems, a hybrid collection by David Harrison Horton, reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

Whether as poetry, personal revelation, or simply the transcription of the dynamic play of the uninhibited mind in flux, writing that evades deliberate, conscious direction has the potential to convert language from a practical vehicle of plain communication to an otherly-textured medium in which words are brought together and narratives are shaped on the basis…
Side A Fiction: “Pieterjan Thyjssen” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Pieterjan Thyjssen For Peter Bullen One day during my morning walk I ran into Jim sporting the most staggering of haircuts. All the people around us, with their boring lives, their tedious bangs and fauxhawks, walking their shallow dogs, oblivious to the very concept of absolute beauty, each became entangled in leashes as their animals…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Matthew Weddig

after a generally positively reviewed yet deeply boomerfied slasher released in 2022 when you are too old to fuckall you have left to you is murder your only options now arerent out the farmhouse in the backblock the exits with your frail bodythe passage of time owes you this muchwhy should the young bodies be…