Author: Heavy Feather

Book Review: “The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s Collection of Tiny Heartbreaks and Keen Hopes” by Rosalia Scalia

Jen Michalski’s newest book, The Company of Strangers, gives us 194 pages of tiny heartbreaks and keen hopes. In a collection of 15 short stories, we see a slice of America through an array of characters who strive to manage and navigate complex lives, and at times, unexpected, heartbreaking events that befall them with the…
“The Harmonic Structure of a Life”: Ryan Nowlin Reviews The Unwanted Sounds, a poetry collection by Lorraine Lupo

Writing letters to Lorraine Lupo over a period of three years was an extension of our friendship. Also, we engaged in dialogic literary criticism. Every time I sat down to write in response to a letter from Lorraine, not only did I reflect on what was happening in our current lives but also what I…
Zachary Kocanda Reviews Kevin Maloney’s Novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim

How far would you go to live the life you imagined for yourself when you were young and anything was possible? To avoid working for your dad’s friend’s company for the rest of your life and hating yourself? Kevin Maloney’s new novel, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, chronicles the misadventures of the titular man-child—also named Kevin Maloney—on…
“[UNTITLED LOVE SONG],” an acrostic poem by Jess Yuan

Favorite observer, how youUndulate between a blue loud emptiness and thisCeiling which shelters andKeeps the perimeter defined Throughout and beneathHeaping insight upon insight until it compactsEnriches, densifies, coagulates into Prediction for the built worldArtifact of its struggle, puddled.That’s my anxiety about establishingRelationships. I worry the Investment is seen byAll. I worry theRecording sounds like I know…
Haunted Passages Digital Collage: “The Frenzy of an Indispensable Hallucination” by Bill Wolak

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages and photographs have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, and Barfly Poetry Magazine.
The Future: “The Buddha Who Couldn’t Feel & The Fish on the Floor,” a flash by Emily Lu

You were the buddha who couldn’t feel. They carved you out of the grotto in Henan, dilated and full of stone. Sent you to look after a new mountain. On your journey here, they left your feet behind. They lost every one of your thousand arms and installed your seat too high up from the…
“And Then What”: A Review of Julia Guez’s The Certain Body by Eric David Helms

“The dark is very dark,” Guez writes in “Still Life When All Our Symptoms Seem to Have Symptoms of Their Own,” a poem folded within The Certain Body, a collection which, over a span of three sections, examines the brave new world of grief and isolation during quarantine. With a tongue that combines “moon blood…
Short Fiction: “Adrift” by Max Wheeler

Like so much in Hassan’s long life, this transition was something done to him, not by him. My mom sounded resigned when she called me the night before my monthly visit. Her husband had been changing in small ways for a while already. “Look, honey. I have to tell you something.” I could tell she’d…
Two Poems by Julian Mithra

Marooned by Organs[1] hooee bighorn or prongbucki’m fat for backs hunched against arctic. Beacham’s offcollecting buffalo pies to hold back toothache pain, a furrow for hide-hunters to finger when we runout of bulletsand spit hormone circles, panting, free rangethrough rabbitbrush lungsand cliffrose kidneys gait, the kind of country broken by ditches and ravinesand canteringas hard as anything bloodsoak,…