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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Book review: “The Escape from Five Shadows” by Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard was in his early 30s and still learning his craft when, in 1956, he published The Escape from Five Shadows. Missing is the snappy dialogue that [...]