Author: Heavy Feather

La Serenissima, a poetry collection by Wallace Barker, reviewed by Donald Ryan

Wallace Barker’s La Serenissima from Gob Pile Press. 19 chapters. 19 vacations. Each poem a single sentence, less than a page, recounting moments in instances. Like photographs in a family album, the poems are souvenirs. You may not know the people in the picture or what’s taking place in the background, but within each frame…
Bad Survivalist: “What Makes You Feral,” a short story by Julie Wernersbach

PIPE BURST. COME EARLY. She rushed. What did she expect? A pipe shattering in mid-air, hard water bursting from the metal and plastic ceiling in frozen shards, an icy scream hovering above the Junior Prom dresses. But when the woman got to work, the emergency was only water on the floor, all the way to…
Condemned to Cymru, a novel by M.J. Nicholls, reviewed by Eric Williams

M.J. Nicholls’ new novel Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. It even affects the Rabelaisian flourish of an artificial structure—the story is mostly presented as one pathetic misanthrope’s alphabetized travelogue (of sorts) of Wales, written for a sinister Icelandic thinktank…
Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…
Fiction for Side A: “Feast” by Andrea Marcusa

Feast The double-wide steel door clanks shut. I stand next to the man who collected me from the waiting room. We are the only people in the huge elevator. I am naked except for my thin gown. The man barely looks at me. He rolls back on his heels and digs his hands into his…
Side A Short Story: “Adults Told Me” by Mark Benedict

Adults Told Me 1. My science teacher told me that life was slapdash. I talked to him after class sometimes; science was one of the few subjects in high school I was interested in. “God’s plan my butt,” Mr. Burke said, slurping coffee. “Evolution is flukier than the weather. Would a divine plan really include…
Poetry for Side A: “Dear Cut-Glass” by William Erickson

Dear Cut-Glass, It’s been longerthan I thoughtthis trail of bloodwould go, butthe mountain isso much smallerat its peak thanwhen we drewthose picturesinto the duston your windshield.Do you still have it,the baby we madefrom all thoseleftover dinnerconversations?Remember, wenamed it Alice andcalled your parentswith the news butno one answered.The sky is fallingis a thing we’d saywhen it…
“My Dog Is That One”: Angelo Maneage Interviewed by Zach Savich

“It felt right to be coughing on the ground,” Angelo Maneage tells us in The Improper Use of Plates, his remarkable chapbook of poems. His work is rich with that kind of off-kilter “rightness.” They get “horny in a different way,” slide on their stomachs, crawl around, cough up transmissions that flicker like a “blue bubble…
An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a memoir by Kristin Keane, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

Memoir often serves as a vehicle for a writer—a way to recall or reconfigure a period of time or a memory. For Kristin Keane, these recollections in An Encyclopedia of Bending Time allow her to rebuild her late mother’s image, and to thin the new space between them. Grief is omnipresent here. Grief is a…