Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Some Membrane to Push Against”: Time, Memory, and Representation in Hayden Church’s So What? by Dustin Cole

Hayden Church’s new poetry collection So What? opens with a more or less perfect short story. “Jackson County War” is narrated by a perceptive three-year-old who describes the razing of his family farm and the slaughtering of its black and white inhabitants by the Great Possums, a powerful Jackson County clan disgruntled by the outcome…
“What We Leave Behind”: William O’Daly’s Poetry Collection The New Gods Reviewed by Toti O’Brien

With no title poem to ease our way, we wonder who William O’Daly’s New Gods are. Trying to identify them is one of several paths we can borrow as we tread the intricate landscape of his verse. Are they uppercase, lowercase? Singular or multiple? Are they better than the old ones? Are the old ones…
Book Review: The Anchored World, flash fairy tales and folklore by Jasmine Sawers, reviewed by Stephanie Martin

The Anchored World, Jasmine Sawers’ debut collection, uses flash fiction to reimagine classic Eastern and Western fairy tales and folklore that are often much longer than what Sawers’ has written. However, Sawers not only reimagines fairy tales and folklore; they also invent their own along the way. On the surface, Sawers’ collection seems to answer…
“A Duality, a Duet”: Reading Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures by Maxx Fidalgo

Described as a “genderbent, queer, biracial modern-retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein,” Addie Tsai delivers on all descriptors. Unwieldy Creatures follows Plum and Dr. Frank, two queer, nonbinary scientists who embark on their journey to play gods and create a human embryo without egg or sperm. In frame stories nestled into each other like Russian…
The Distortions, stories by Christopher Linforth, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe

In The Distortions, Christopher Linforth transports us to Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina in the aftermath of war. A bit of history to bring the book into focus: when Yugoslavia broke up into six independent countries in the nineties, Serbian nationalism led to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The twelve stories in this collection provoke…
“The Surreal Rendering of Trauma in Black Wool Cape by Alison Carb Sussman”: A Review by Jessica Purdy

Readers of Black Wool Cape will not be able to look away from Alison Carb Sussman’s surreal, deeply sensitive vision of the world and the part she plays in its histories. If the title Black Wool Cape conjures mysterious images of women on the verge of madness, let it also remind us of the horrors…
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…