Author: Heavy Feather
-
Side A Flash Fiction: “Another Life” by Darci Schummer
Another Life In another life, I am married to a Japanese man who was born in Toyko. “Moshi moshi,” he says when he answers the phone. We fell in love because he had a pompadour and wore leather pants, could play a hollow-bodied Gretsch guitar behind his back. At night, his dexterous hands made a…
-
Mount Summer, a short story collection by Travis Dahlke, reviewed by Marin Killen
Mount Summer is the collaborative product of Travis Dahlke, Jeff Dragan, and John Shields—writer, musician, and illustrator respectively. Produced by “the literary arm” of Out to Lunch Records, Lunch Break Zine, Mount Summer falls into the category of “extra-musical,” and accordingly the texture and sound of the prose stands out as well as the accompanying…
-
Revenge of the Scapegoat, a satirical novel by Caren Beilin, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou
Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat begins and ends in a café in Philadelphia, where the protagonist, Iris, waits for her friend Ray. The two scenes are eerily similar, down to Iris’ outfits and the presence of flying insects around their table. And both sections open with a single, stand-alone sentence: “I was upset.” Iris’…
-
Capricorn, Venus Descendant, 50 poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, reviewed by Cinda Coggins Mosher
I first encountered Michael Joyce’s work in 1998, in a graduate seminar at the University of Iowa on hypertext fiction featuring such works of his as Of Two Minds, Afternoon (“the granddaddy of hypertext fictions”), Twilight: A Symphony, and Twelve Blue. The highlight of this course, and of my graduate studies as a whole, was the…
-
“Et In Suburbia Ego”: Andrew Farkas Reviews Aimee Parkison’s short fiction collection Suburban Death Project
The suburbs are supposed to be safety incarnate. Originally, they were more closely associated with urban areas, though removed from the inner city where everyone lives so close together, where anything can happen. As the suburbs pushed out farther and farther, as their design plans rejected grids for labyrinths ending in cul-de-sacs, they became their…
-
Cavanaugh, a new novel by Joshua Kornreich, reviewed by Pedro Ponce
Is it too soon to revisit the Brett Kavanaugh story? I wondered this as I became immersed in the world of Cavanaugh, the latest from novelist Joshua Kornreich. Last year’s American Crime Story: Impeachment (2021) proves that waiting pays off when adapting stories from the headlines. More than two decades later, Ryan Murphy’s retelling of…
-
“Longed for as a Memory”: Anne Graue on Millicent Borges Accardi’s Through a Grainy Landscape
The opening poem, “A Man Sleeps, the Skies Move,” sets the tone of Millicent Borges Accardi’s poetry collection, Through a Grainy Landscape—one of imminent worry and portent, one of the sadness of memory and admissions of guilt, one of the realities of life “that it is what it is.” The speaker tells a child, “Please,…
-
“Capturing the Is-ness of Liminal Events”: Avinash Rajendran’s Dual Review of Rites and Thin Places
“What are these dark days I see in this world so badly bent … How much longer can it last? How long can it go on?” Dylan asks prophetically in his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a question that has endured in our collective imagination for two years now. The Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci…
-
The Pit, and No Other Stories, short stories by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell
Small towns carry with them idyllic scenes of easy living, tight-knit communities, and happy families. Most of the inhabitants are not new; instead, generations often run deeper than the town wells and reservoirs. But once a bit of the surface paint chips off, the ugliness underneath begins to show. What happens when a town with…
Heavy Feather Review 