Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Patrick Parks Reads Kat Meads’ Novella While Visiting Babette

In the last few years, the novella has undergone a resurgence. Some observers attribute its newfound popularity to a readership that has neither the time nor the patience for a novel but is looking for something weightier than a mere short story. And while there are now a growing number of novellas being published and…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Wahidah Tambee’s Typographical Collection Eke

Information theory defines its index in terms of the likelihood of being able to predict the next symbol in a sequence. Counterintuitively, the highest information density appears where a string is entirely random. Given the letters “ajhhjnyv … ,” the next character could be any of the twenty-six options available on a standard keyboard. By…
Poetry Review: Jen Schneider Reads Naima Yael Tokunow’s Anthology Permanent Record

In Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive, editor Naima Yael Tokunow queries convention and prompts ongoing conversation in and of the archival record as conventionally styled and fashioned. In the work’s Introduction, Tokunow asks, in part: “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to…
“Language Is the Todeslager of Being”: Notes on Louis Armand’s Golemgrad Pentalogy by David Vichnar

Introduction: Necromodernism and the City of the Dead Necromodernism names the condition of literature after the death of its modernist and postmodernist projects. If modernism imagined the text as a monument to cultural renewal, and postmodernism played among its ruins with irony and bricolage, necromodernism arises when both gestures have collapsed. Literature no longer renews…
“Disclosure of the Divine Through the Self”: Edward J. Matthews Reads Spyridon St. Kogkas’ Avant-Garde Poetry Collection Hermeslang

At the dawn of the 21st century, language is no longer a purely semantic enterprise, that is, an assemblage of words, phrases, and sentences that convey ideas, concepts, and emotions. Granted, language may at times be polysemic, ironic, or ambiguous, which are qualities that have often been exploited in traditional forms of poetry. Today, language…
Fiction Review: Isabelle Zhu Reads Ann Cavlovic’s Novel Count on Me

On the topic of workplace harassment, one of my former colleagues once made the remark, “You should be able to advocate for yourself, since you’re mature.” For him, the capacity to believe that one’s version of reality is legitimate and ought to be fought for is a necessary condition of maturity. He implied that there…
Poetry Review: Matt Betts Reads Samiya Bashir’s Collection I Hope This Helps

It’s hard not to be floored by I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir. The pieces in this collection come at us from unexpected directions and sneak up in stealth mode. The first piece “The Dressmaker” shows up, unannounced to let us know this isn’t going to go the way we expect it to. It…
“Cheers to the Weirdos!”: Jesi Bender Presents a Heavy Feather Favorites List for 2025

Here we go again! Putting together this year brings me such joy and I hope you find something beautiful here, too. Sometimes, it can seem as if no one reads anymore but making this list reassures me that there are a lot of us out there, still trying to learn, still trying to create, still…
Review: Matt Martinson Reads Kelly Krumrie’s Genre-Defying Book No Measure

I remember reading Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? in grad school, with his near-constant refrain: “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” He saw a world in which human industry was advancing even as the ability or willingness to ask the big questions about life was…