Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry for Side A: “Like So” by Sharon Mesmer

Like So —after Alfonsina Storni, Argentina, 1892 –1938 1/ I’m reading a book on how to live and wondering if it’s truethat loving someone transfigures everything.I doubt if anyone truly loves.They just infuse all things with themselves and move on. I might grasp the subtle order of existence if I could learnhow some people never…
Shannon Nakai on Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods

The woods have often served as the storyteller’s theater of magical encounters and warnings. Breadcrumbs, lost trekkers, magic brooks, foreboding creatures—the trappings of the somewhat mystical aura that an uninterrupted primal space lends now hedges a 21st-century rural academic community. Juxtaposing folkloric history against a contemporary college town, Janice Obuchowski’s short story collection The Woods…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2022

I’m a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer from a very particular, what-some-have-deemed-“weird” taste. Given this affliction, I wanted to create a list of suggestions from authors who share my penchant for more experimental or innovative…
Review: “An Emphasis on Origins in Figment by Leila Chatti” by Morgan English

Leila Chatti’s new work Figment is a book-length poem which loosely takes the form of an abecedarian. The alphabet acts as a guide through the associative, musical leaps Chatti makes from page to page. We first see the alphabet pushing the book along with: “amorphous / blank // belief be / lie con / ceive…
“Take-Out,” an original fiction by Kip Knott for Flavor Town USA

Sometimes Clay can’t believe he still lives in the house he grew up in. His dad still lives there, too. Clay and his dad have been hearing a strange sound in the house for well over a month now. They hear it in the morning as they guzzle cups of Taster’s Choice and nosh on…
“The Painting and the Parrot,” a Haunted Passages flash by David Luntz

I wrote this story once about a guy who kills his best friend. Well, he wasn’t really his friend at the time. They used to be friends. I don’t want to give too much away in case the story gets published. But at the end of the story the guy’s staring at this painting his…
“There is now only light in my eyes”: On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Peter Valente

Antonio Gamoneda was only five years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He came of age during the Franco regime, a time when fear, ideological repression, incarcerations, and executions were commonplace. It is no surprise that someone who experienced such a world would not take the representations of reality for granted. In…
“Masks” for Haunted Passages: Short Story Excerpt from How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, a new collection by Orrin Grey

When it comes to short fiction, Orrin Grey is a magician, a practitioner of an arcane art inspired by the likes of Méliès, Welles, and Bradbury. Through literary legerdemain and stylistic sleight-of-hand, he takes the well-told weird tale into a realm of the supernatural, the uncanny, the theatrical, and, most importantly, the entertaining. And entertainment…
Three New Poems for Haunted Passages by Eva Heisler

Call Off the Angels Flashy enough in appearance—and I assume this motivated the selection—the group is much older than advertised.One is wheezing into its elbowwith nasty spectral effects. Anotherstinks of drained aquariums.And who’s that junkyard angelwith the ankle bracelet.That angel is high. Every other wordis either “fuck” or “Christ.”Haloes clinkas they bump against one another—the…