Category: Reviews & Criticism
-
Gabriel Blackwell: Best of 2012
You’re reading a “Best of 2012” list to get some recommendations for 2013, to begin to parse the prodigious number of books published/albums released/movies premiered in 2012, to reassure yourself that you’re staying on top of things somehow, to nod along with everyone else at the expected results (that book/movie/song, again?), to shake your head…
-
“The House by the Sea”: Daniel J. Cecil Reviews Petrarchan by Kristina Marie Darling
In short-order three works by the same author, Kristina Marie Darling, landed on my desk. I feel a certain amount of hesitation when I decide to review another writer’s work. I almost get a bit itchy. I was initially inclined by gut reaction to pass on this one—reviewing the same author (Darling) within a few…
-
“The War Within Us”: A Review of Robert Kloss’ Novel(la) The Alligators of Abraham by Sheldon Lee Compton
Now a voice spoke low from the face of the deep. Rarely before have I read a first sentence from a book that so adequately set the tone for everything to follow than this opening sentence from Robert Kloss’ Alligators of Abraham. Of course the great openings we’ve all come to know so well spring…
-
Five-and-Five: Okla Elliott’s 2012 List
I love lists. I make them for any number of reasons. They help me organize my thoughts or review events, among a dozen other things, so when I was asked to compile a 2012 list for Heavy Feather Review, I accepted immediately. After I had compiled a little over half of this list, however, I…
-
Mike Meginnis: Four Books I Gave as Gifts in 2012, and One I Received
I don’t know what the best books were this year. Mostly I don’t like to read things right after they come out, when people on the Internet and in the magazines are talking about how great they are. This is partly because most of the time I don’t really agree with most of my friends…
-
Colette Arrand Reviews The King of New Orleans: How the Junkyard Dog Became Professional Wrestling’s First Black Superhero
The King of New Orleans advertises itself as the story of how Sylvester Ritter, the professional wrestler better known as the Junkyard Dog, became wrestling’s first black superhero, but the thus-far definitive document on the former star is scant on biographical detail and long on attendance figures and gate receipts. Author Greg Klein, a journalist…
-
edward j rathke Reviews Water, a novel by J.A. Tyler,
J.A. Tyler’s Water is not a dream. It is two dreams. A dream of rain and a dream of fire. A prayer for land and a hunt for water. It is a dozen children gathered together, telling stories, finding worlds within one another, waiting for the rain to stop if only for a moment. It…
-
Jordan Sanderson Review: Thunderbird, poetry by Dorothea Lasky
The poems in Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbird have two faces: “One side [is] normal,” but “[t]he other side [is] cut into, so that the muscle flap[s].” The collection navigates a number of dialectics, including beauty and ugliness, air and flesh, understanding and misunderstanding, speech and silence, love and hate, hope and despair, the cerebral and the…
-
Ryan Werner Reviews The Law of Strings, stories by Steven Gillis
As I am an idiot, it’s unsurprising that I was not the speaker at my college graduation. I was nominated but ended up being runner-up, blew it in the final interview stages when I was asked what I learned from my non-liberal arts classes—math and science, specifically—and replied, “I learned how to write about torture.”…
Heavy Feather Review 