Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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“There is now only light in my eyes”: On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Peter Valente
Antonio Gamoneda was only five years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He came of age during the Franco regime, a time when fear, ideological repression, incarcerations, and executions were commonplace. It is no surprise that someone who experienced such a world would not take the representations of reality for granted. In…
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Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, a debut collection by BD Feil, reviewed by Jen Schneider
Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, written by BD Feil and published by Finishing Line Press, is a powerful force—one that leaves us curious about, if not optimistic for, experiences that lie ahead, and contemplative about the past. The collection propels while remaining bluntly and squarely grounded in periods of time and places no more.…
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Pharoni, a novel by Colin Dodds, reviewed by Aaron Lee Moore
Thanks to the residual and resounding success of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, part of me now wonders if we’re now in for a resurrected trope of resurrected characters in literature. This is a sticky and risky wicket. Though with the notable exception of the biblical Christ, in most works of literature the loss…
Heavy Feather Review 