Poem: “Allelulia steeples”
Alleluia steeples By Patrick T. Reardon Give me two mule-loads of mud flooded with the Lord God, the water in which I washed, plunged seven times, gagged, splashed, amok, spluttered, my flesh like the flesh of a child...
Book review: “The Hussar” by David R. Slavitt
David Slavitt’s novel The Hussar is the story of Lieutenant Stefan F———, a young Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer in 1866, new to his regiment and to military life, who, in his bungling callowness, falls into a situation in which he is...
A new look for my website — The Loop!
The top of the homepage at my website — patricktreardon.com — now has a link to pre-order my upcoming book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago from Amazon.com. Of course, you can just click here. Or go to my...
Book review: “The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” by William Dalrymple
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple is a richly researched, engagingly told and brutally direct indictment of the British stock company that systematically raped the...
Book review: “Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning” by John William Reps
If you want to know Chicago, you gotta know the grid. If I tell you I live at 6220 North Paulina Street, you know that my two-flat is 62 blocks north of Madison Street, or just under eight miles, the rule of thumb being eight blocks to a...
Essay: George R. Stewart: Unrestrained by literary borders
A conversation with a writer is, almost always, interesting and insightful. During a long career as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I was paid to talk with many, including Robert Caro, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Russo, Haki Madhubuti...
Book review: “Maskerade” by Terry Pratchett
In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy. But he was also, always, serious. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t only aimed at getting a laugh. He employed...
Book review: “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century” by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph
Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, weakest, most damaged of the poor — is identified...
Poem: Behind the mask
Behind the mask By Patrick T. Reardon (mask) Behind the museum glass, a polished marble scream, frozen, with large round eye openings, pale stone, gray as smoke, worn in ritual by one with sharp edge, honed for soft flesh...
Poem: “Go”
Go By Patrick T. Reardon In remembrance of Maggie Roche, Ben Scheinkopf, George Kresovich and David Reardon Right onto Cermak from Harlem to go west, listening to the dead singer’s song from when she was young, from when I...
Poem: The lost tribes, part 3
The lost tribes, part 3 By Patrick T. Reardon The lost tribes found me alone as she and he stared into each other’s eyes. They found me with drool chafing my chin, a clump of flesh that nervoused her, carried by him like a bag of...
Poem: Word
Word By Patrick T. Reardon Declaw the lion King to a plaster saint. Declaw Lincoln to a penny. Declaw Francis to a birdbath. Declaw the man with nails in his wrists. Pull claws from humbly proffered hands. Pull teeth. Pull the skin...
Poem: Saw you at the hop
Saw you at the hop By Patrick T. Reardon I was nine when I saw you through open eighth grade door — before you went to Army, to Europe, to Normandy Beach a week after D-Day, and hernia, and British nurse Betsie, and Germany, the camp...
Book review: “Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists and Intellectuals 1893-1930,” edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed
In November, 1904, Fannie Barrier Williams, activist, iconoclast, orator and writer, led an attack on racism with a tea cup. She and other members of Chicago’s interracial Frederick Douglass Center held a reception at which the women, black and...
Poem: “Goddess Dementia”
Goddess Dementia By Patrick T. Reardon Goddess Dementia, come, waltz with me down gray floors, along sour green walls, through Muzak air. Undress me in my doorless room. One button at a time, unfasten my pajama top, unbutton...
Book review: “The Wilton Diptych: Making & Meaning” by Dillian Gordon
All art is strange, disquieting. Read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or attend a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. These are idiosyncratic creations to the extreme. Nothing else quite like them, even works by the same...
Book review: “The Painted Word” by Tom Wolfe
The Painted Word is an essay by Tom Wolfe, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in April, 1975 and then released in June of that year as a slim book, 99 pages in the edition I just read. In it, Wolfe, then a wunderkind of what was beginning...
Book review: “Interesting Times” by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels have sold in the millions, so it stands to reason that there must be a lot of people who are fans of Rincewind. He is, of course, the main character in seven of the books, including three of the first...
Poem: Bridge
Bridge By Patrick T. Reardon My first job landed on me like a ton of children on my four-hundred-and-twenty-eighth day. It began with my brother. Two sisters followed. Two more brothers. Eight more sisters. The first leads...
Book review: “Dancing with Langston” by Sharyn Skeeter
Carrie’s husband Bill doesn’t make an appearance in Sharyn Skeeter’s Dancing with Langston until near the end of the novel. And, when he does show up at the Harlem apartment of soon-to-be-evicted Cousin Ella, the reader’s ready to dislike...