Author: Heavy Feather

Short Fiction: “To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies” by John Madera

The day the killer killed the bitch, the town-they-called-a-city’s grayscale sky went cartoon blue. White sun crashing through, it made the spring that felt like fall feel like spring again, if only before it felt like fall again. A fall, though, where an American Robin’s breast could be confused for bronze, its song a string…
Ansgar Allen: Review of Performances for the End of Time by Harold Jaffe

Harold Jaffe’s latest, Performances for the End of Time, has all but given up on humanity. In the assessment of the book, humanity is facing its end, and knows it. This knowledge cannot be digested. There is no digesting the fact of one’s imminent and unavoidable self-destruction. Humanity persists within the book as a serviceable…
“Some Membrane to Push Against”: Time, Memory, and Representation in Hayden Church’s So What? by Dustin Cole

Hayden Church’s new poetry collection So What? opens with a more or less perfect short story. “Jackson County War” is narrated by a perceptive three-year-old who describes the razing of his family farm and the slaughtering of its black and white inhabitants by the Great Possums, a powerful Jackson County clan disgruntled by the outcome…
“What We Leave Behind”: William O’Daly’s Poetry Collection The New Gods Reviewed by Toti O’Brien

With no title poem to ease our way, we wonder who William O’Daly’s New Gods are. Trying to identify them is one of several paths we can borrow as we tread the intricate landscape of his verse. Are they uppercase, lowercase? Singular or multiple? Are they better than the old ones? Are the old ones…
Two Poems by Anthony Robinson

Failures of the Poets Wyatt couldn’t keep count of his “numbrous vers”And when I mentioned this, a user said, “pronounced properly,They scan perfectly.” They do not, but as a rule,I’ve stopped arguing with old men. The shaggy poems,Derived from an old Italian, have their mincing charms,And for this he did not deserve hanging, nor beheading.It’s unfortunate…
Book Review: The Anchored World, flash fairy tales and folklore by Jasmine Sawers, reviewed by Stephanie Martin

The Anchored World, Jasmine Sawers’ debut collection, uses flash fiction to reimagine classic Eastern and Western fairy tales and folklore that are often much longer than what Sawers’ has written. However, Sawers not only reimagines fairy tales and folklore; they also invent their own along the way. On the surface, Sawers’ collection seems to answer…
“A Duality, a Duet”: Reading Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures by Maxx Fidalgo

Described as a “genderbent, queer, biracial modern-retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein,” Addie Tsai delivers on all descriptors. Unwieldy Creatures follows Plum and Dr. Frank, two queer, nonbinary scientists who embark on their journey to play gods and create a human embryo without egg or sperm. In frame stories nestled into each other like Russian…
The Distortions, stories by Christopher Linforth, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe

In The Distortions, Christopher Linforth transports us to Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina in the aftermath of war. A bit of history to bring the book into focus: when Yugoslavia broke up into six independent countries in the nineties, Serbian nationalism led to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The twelve stories in this collection provoke…
“The Surreal Rendering of Trauma in Black Wool Cape by Alison Carb Sussman”: A Review by Jessica Purdy

Readers of Black Wool Cape will not be able to look away from Alison Carb Sussman’s surreal, deeply sensitive vision of the world and the part she plays in its histories. If the title Black Wool Cape conjures mysterious images of women on the verge of madness, let it also remind us of the horrors…