Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Coleen Muir on I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, an essay collection by Jamie Iredell
Jamie Iredell’s I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac, published by Future Tense Books, is a collection of nineteen essays that moves linearly from Iredell’s childhood to his early fatherhood. The pieces in this collection range from personal to intellectual, cultural, and political, and hover primarily over topics of body image, racism, sexism, drug…
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The Tide King, a novel by Jen Michalski, reviewed by Merridawn Duckler
Magic and fantasy, the supra and the supernatural are having a good long run in modern fiction. I approve of blurred lines among genre but—grumpy cat impersonator that I am—nothing entrances me less than the promise that I shall be entranced. Because chances are I’m not going to be entranced by the magic of magic…
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Brett Beach on The Old Priest, short stories by Anthony Wallace
“The state of New Jersey seems to be not much more than a gigantic strip mall.” This reflection comes near the end of Anthony Wallace’s The Old Priest, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2013. The collection’s final story turns a mythic eye to the recent past, when the state was a wild…
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Safe House, a poetry chapbook by David Winter, reviewed by Emily Rose Larsen
Poet David Winter’s debut collection, Safe House is a svelte but fierce chapbook. The compilation’s title is honored throughout the text by the themes of misplaced intimacy, desire, and imprisonment. Winter creates a collection of poems that function as individual spaces of shelter or safety. Some prove to be faulty and some are ethereal. Past…
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Contrapuntal, poetry by Christopher Kondrich, reviewed by Erin McKnight
Following in the artistic practice of combining melodies, Christopher Kondrich’s Contrapuntal sounds a textured tone. If music must be written to be best appreciated by others, a narrative crescendo establishes the counterpoint of this sonorous collection. Because what resounds is a symphony of inventiveness, Kondrich its assured conductor. None of the fifty-nine poems are titled;…
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Review: Kate Kimball on Drawing Water by Eva Heisler
Perhaps one of the most difficult processes to demonstrate, investigate, interrogate, mimic, and exemplify in poetry is that of the creation of a poem itself, and yet, in Drawing Water, that is precisely what writer Eva Heisler sets out to do. But, this isn’t the typical meta-writing that many readers may be familiar with and…
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The Ides of March: An Anthology of Ohio Poets, edited by Hannah Stephenson, reviewed by Ezekiel Black
The editors of Heavy Feather Review chose me to review The Ides of March because of my inexperience with Ohio. They wanted an outside perspective, and this they shall receive. That is, my only exposure to Ohioan culture was a wedding I recently attended. Although the wedding was in Kentucky, the bride and her family…
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“A Miraculous Construct of Worlds”: In the Kettle, the Shriek, poetry by Hannah Stephenson, reviewed by Paul David Adkins
There is something miraculous and mysterious inhabiting Hannah Stephenson’s debut poetry volume In the Kettle, the Shriek. Through Stephenson’s meticulous style, there’s a world being constructed within its pages, a world of couplets and tercets and blocks. She uses the precision and exactitude of a watchmaker to populate this landscape with beautiful details. Then, just…
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“Think of Your Kid”: Microtones, poetry by Robert Vaughan, reviewed by Jeremy Hauck
In a recent essay in Boston Review titled “Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect,” Calvin Bedient writes that “Vehemence of feeling nonplusses the modern personality, a hostage to ambiguity and irony.” He says, “More and more poets are suspicious of lyrical expression and devote themselves to emotionally neutral methods.” While Robert Vaughan’s Microtones can…
Heavy Feather Review 