Author: Heavy Feather
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“Maternal Monsters”: E.B. Schnepp Reviews Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross
Michelle Ross’ second collection, Shapeshifting, can only be described as a procession of horrifying transformations. More specifically, this is a series of horrifying female transformations that reveal with startling clarity the lack of agency that comes from existing in a feminine body, particularly when it comes to childbearing and its corresponding vulnerabilities. This transformation is demonstrated…
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“A Disquieting Truth in Broken Hearts”: Robert Crooke Reviews Proof of Me & Other Stories by Erica Plouffe Lazure
In subtly connected tales of life in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, Erica Plouffe Lazure writes as if sharing yarns about her own extended family. She knows her people that well. And she has Eudora Welty’s sense of the way people and places determine each other’s fate. Thus, a naturalist’s field excursion in “Spawning…
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“There Is No Answer to the Simplicity of Weather,” a collaborative poem by Leigh Chadwick & Mitchell Nobis
My dreams are nothing but a wall of owls. I wake up all eyes and twisted thumbs. The birds are back in pre-dawn spring. I’m stuck in an alarm clock of sweetness and tweets as the river pushes heavy with dead winter and trash. Benches are free unless you’re poor. I think about church, but…
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Six Poems by A. Martine
i have my own problems i stop telling everyone i’m a good listener people profess they miss mebefore i clock the sentiment i askwhat did you losewhat is wrongwhat is it from me that you need i’m sorrygoodwill has again done a number on mei don’t want to take or be taken care ofi want…
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What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald
In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…
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Book Review: Shannon Wolf on Bud Smith’s novel Teenager
Collectively, we’ve been obsessed with the Bonnie and Clyde narrative for decades. In the 1950s, we were a nation held captive by the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in Nebraska and Wyoming. Those murders inspired the Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers in 1994. So,…
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A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, stories by Steve Gergley, reviewed by Kassie Bohannon
In A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, Steve Gergley provides several perspectives on the titular experience, including everything from epic battles between man and God in the desert to surreal in-between moments where a couple fights to revive passion while also fighting for their eternal souls. There are hilarious moments with unprofessional dentists, sorrowful…
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Bad Survivalist: Three Poems by Ryan Clinesmith
Apocalypse I ——An apocalypse is an enzyme of separation, salt turned sugar, apples oxidizing, blue death, survival as the catalyst to enjoying sunsets, closing your eyes in a Mecca-crowd, a 42nd-St-New-Year’s-Eve crowd, closing your eyes only after looking around to see you are the crowd—— or it’s the time, a block before we got back…
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The Year of the Horses, a memoir by Courtney Maum, reviewed by Shannon Wolf
For Courtney Maum, The Year of the Horses followed a period of intense internal struggle. A crisis of identity as her daughter turned two brought on a bout of depression and insomnia so significant, it caused her life—and marriage—to stall. She found herself at a crossroads and needed to take the right path—and being a…
Heavy Feather Review 