Category: Reviews & Criticism
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“A Disquieting Truth in Broken Hearts”: Robert Crooke Reviews Proof of Me & Other Stories by Erica Plouffe Lazure
In subtly connected tales of life in a small, Eastern North Carolina town, Erica Plouffe Lazure writes as if sharing yarns about her own extended family. She knows her people that well. And she has Eudora Welty’s sense of the way people and places determine each other’s fate. Thus, a naturalist’s field excursion in “Spawning…
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What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald
In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…
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Book Review: Shannon Wolf on Bud Smith’s novel Teenager
Collectively, we’ve been obsessed with the Bonnie and Clyde narrative for decades. In the 1950s, we were a nation held captive by the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in Nebraska and Wyoming. Those murders inspired the Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers in 1994. So,…
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A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, stories by Steve Gergley, reviewed by Kassie Bohannon
In A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, Steve Gergley provides several perspectives on the titular experience, including everything from epic battles between man and God in the desert to surreal in-between moments where a couple fights to revive passion while also fighting for their eternal souls. There are hilarious moments with unprofessional dentists, sorrowful…
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The Year of the Horses, a memoir by Courtney Maum, reviewed by Shannon Wolf
For Courtney Maum, The Year of the Horses followed a period of intense internal struggle. A crisis of identity as her daughter turned two brought on a bout of depression and insomnia so significant, it caused her life—and marriage—to stall. She found herself at a crossroads and needed to take the right path—and being a…
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“The Mystery of Growing Up”: Robert Crooke Reviews When Me and God Were Little by Mads Nygaard
In this complex and personal novel, dedicated to his father, Mads Nygaard spins a web of mysteries around family secrets, religious obsession, and psychic unrest in a bleakly rugged Danish setting. It is Nordic fairy tale, social history, and Danish-Lutheran parable in equal parts. And a wondrous narrative featuring innocently cynical observations by a seven-year-old…
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Music Is Over!, a novella by Ben Arzate, reviewed by Carl Fuerst
In 2013, I visited my brother in NYC, where he’d moved to pursue a career as a chef. I was a lifelong Midwesterner, and I imagined that the New York City subways wouldn’t be much different than the Red Line in Chicago. But this was fundamentally different. Before the pandemic began, nearly 5.5 million people…
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“Sometimes You Wanna Go Where Nobody Knows Anybody’s Name”: Dustin Holland on Steve Aylett’s Hyperthick #1
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Picking up a piece of Steve Aylett’s work for the first time is always a confounding experience. His prose and his comics are often inscrutable blends of genres and mediums that wear their influences proudly on their sleeves while being unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered. The…
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I Failed to Swoon, a poetry collection by Nadia de Vries, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou
Nadia de Vries’ I Failed to Swoon is a slim collection of poems that are by turns playful, brutal, and aloof. The poems in this collection are short—some of them no longer than Tweets. Much of the language invokes tropes of internet speech: droll one-liners, self-assured aphorisms, jaded indifference, and cliché. de Vries unsettles the…
Heavy Feather Review 