Author: Heavy Feather

David Leo Rice’s New Novel The New House, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

My wife and I still talk often about the term “art monster”—first coined in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, and introduced to us via Claire Dederer’s 2017 Paris Review article “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” (we don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse, my wife and I).…
“Hewing Hope from Despair”: Sonia Greenfield Reviews Michael Kleber-Diggs’ Worldly Things

There is a great deal to be learned from reading Michael Kleber-Diggs’ Worldly Things. Like how to write a poem that means it, for example. There is a precision to his work, which makes each of his poems feel like a gift because of the care that was put into their composition. His poem, “Seismic…
Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Michelin Star Stool” by Adam Berlin

Le Cirque’s maitre d’leads us past candelabrasdripping wax on polishedcornucopias, mostly Dionysian grapes. He pulls chairs, takes menus tuckedunder his tuxedoed sleeve, hands themto Steiner’s (on his wrista Patek Phillippe) party of eight. The M&A sharkwith the stuffed bellyquestions me,his ex-secretary’s boyfriend on subjectshe knows well,severally:Marriage.Children.Time.Get rid of him, histhree-martinipronouncementto her. He’s old(he’s dead now)…
“Finding the Ghost in Hoarded Objects”: William Lessard Interviews Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin’s art and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her books of poetry include Hoarders, E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. In the following interview, Durbin discusses how…
Deliver Thy Pigs, a debut novel by Joey Hedger, reviewed by Jesse Hilson

We’re often told by craftsmen that “a piece of fiction needs conflict.” Some novels have such a faint outline of what drives a conflict that we must deduce it from clues buried under literary sediment. The struggle is abstract and internal and deep. Not so with Deliver Thy Pigs, the sturdy, workmanlike debut novel by…
Three Poems from The Future: Josh Fomon

Our human shores Absence makes of me a skeletal transmission. A future silence hummed into the ether. In a fog of salt, the marsh blesses the morning. Reflects all our history, our inhuman attempt at living, the sentimental idea of power. We see nothing until it reveals itself or we seek out how far we…
“Familiar,” a Haunted Passages short fiction by Betsy Sharp

Lara, taking the dark path behind. Lara, cold night air. Jacob in the kitchen, frying his ambition in kid-chatter. Jacob cupping plans like colored marbles, yearning for more than can fit in his two hands. He unpacks the lunchbox, Noah playing dinosaur on the back of the sofa with his jacket pulled over his head…
Avery Gregurich: Two Poems for Flavor Town USA

The Recipe Said When Picking Rhubarb, Red or Green Would Doafter Ted Kooser head to walt’s house north of the casino, checking your rearviewoften for any hangerson eager for the whereabouts of the last goodrhubarb of the season. greet walt with bottom shelf rum in exchange for the rhubarb. accept when he pours some in…
“Towards Love”: Cameron Finch Interviews Erin Stalcup

Erin Stalcup is a big-hearted human who writes novels with her blood. What I mean is that when Erin cares about somethings, someones—she goes all in. She is radical and boundary-pushing in all aspects of her life: writing, parenting, teaching. She naturally surges towards narratives that decolonize and invigorate readers to consider the many possibilities…