Every Marred Thing: A Time in America

Description

Patrick T. Reardon

Every Marred Thing: A Time in America

ISBN: 978-1-956921-48-9 (pbk.)

(May 1, 2025; preorder available) 

With echoes of Walt Whitman and Alan Ginsberg, Every Marred Thing: A Time in America pulses with the chaos and cacophony of 21^st century life and with the heartbeat of every soul walking the nation’s streets, plowing its fields, stacking its garbage and sitting in McDonald’s munching on an Egg McMuffin. This is America as a beautiful wasteland, as a howl of faith and hope and confusion. These poems embrace every misfit, outsider, lost soul, sinner and saint, sidewalk preacher, despairing heart, pompous suit, bleacher prophetess, tender shoot, sacred hobo and silly God-clown.  In Every Marred Thing, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John play in the String Bean Band, weed trees take over Interstate 90 near Janesville, the Tribune rewrites the Bible, and “fireflies slash/a dogma across/backyard dark,/prophets of light/from light.” And what answers there are can be found “in the sparrow’s hollow bone” and in the sound of “The Red Line el train,/prayer wheels in the dark.”

“It is landfill time/ will you lay with me?” asks the speaker in Every Marred Thing: A Time in America. From there, the poems take you on a contemporary American journey, at times reminiscent of the sweeping self-revelation, music, and open-ended landscapes of Walt Whitman and in other moments calling on the grit and dissonance of the Beats and free form jazz. These poems don’t shy away from what hurts and what’s ugly about being in this country now. With images as simple and true as holding someone’s face through the phone to shockingly visceral as ‘squirrel carcass flat as a poem for reading,’ the poems in this collection balance grief and loss with soaring descriptions, creating a delightful romp through trash and capitalism and race politics and ways of seeing others and one’s self in the context of an unstable world. I will gladly lay in this landfill and, of course, as an American, I already do. The final poem prescribes: “If you follow my instructions, you can read the desert:/ Don’t blink.”

—Jessica Kennison, co-founder, New Orleans Writers Workshop

It is important to read these poems written by Patrick T. Reardon, because in reading, we learn about all the intricacies of living in America, living in a city, and living in a body. You will want to read about these places in the poems and how they are so devoted to language, how they do the work of honoring the past and present, and how they reveal and allow the body to remember.

It is important to read these poems. In the music and repetition, there is a reverence that allows us to see and love, and how the language is working to help us to understand all of the emotions of living in a body. The poems make you pause and reflect. And how you will stop periodically in the reading. How you stop when the author writes:

Should have learned the flesh of my biography.
Here, here. Here. Should have.
Should have believed the man in the white shirt armor.
Should have kept quiet, played the field
with burdens light and an easy yoke.
Should have sent logic like a balloon to the moon.
Should have quit that place earlier.
Should have danced the mess.

Sometimes, you think that the words in Patrick T. Reardon’s poems are exploring longing, and the regret in this emotion. They remind you that there is occasionally pride, unresolved grief, and at the same time, how there lives so much gratitude and love, and how all these emotions can coexist and inform.

There is truth when the author writes: Every marred thing. Every thing born immaculate.

—Viola Lee, author of the poetry collection Lightening after the Echo (Another New Calligraphy).

Read this book if you are grieving for what cannot be explained through religious faith, for suffering and cruelty that have no simple answers. Read this book for a lament on the state of things in this Marred Time and Place we call America. Patrick T. Reardon is angry but is determined to understand what faith means to him, and to us all. His religion is held up to scrutiny, every belief is up for questioning— and the main question is Why?

Religion sits in McDonald’s, its tables filled with present, past, and future agonies. Is there hope for tomorrow? The dead are everywhere, they are burying themselves, they are dead for three years, they are long-dead. There are lost souls and dead souls. There is a brother’s suicide (why?). There is violence (why?).

Reardon’s religion is a living and breathing entity filled with contradictions, mistakes and enigmas, found in fast food, in sewer mouths, sewer routes and pits. The scene is Chicago, whose streets need to be prayed for. So many beings in need of mercy, things with fangs, sly things. things in fear, things that rot. Every grit thing…Every thing that feels blessed pain. Reardon says, I pew./I paten./ I incense coal./I sacrament the el.

Go down to the basement or the desert with Patrick T. Reardon because this is where holiness resides. You will find the despair and bottled anguish of a brother and a people who knew where to find the guns, who leave us and disappoint us. He invites us to renew faith in the honesty of darkness, the ever persistence of hope.”

—Phyllis Klein, author of The Full Moon Herald and founding host of Poets in Conversation

Whether he is writing from a table at a McDonald’s, a window seat on the Chicago El or a church basement, Patrick T. Reardon reminds us in these poems that the sacred often accompanies the profane, the mystical is found in the mundane. In language that is at times bizarre and Biblical, eye-opening and enigmatic, he offers us a window into what it means to be alive in America in the 21st century. I, for one, am grateful for this fresh new poetic voice, an acute observer of the human condition, a poet repeatedly “recording enigmas.”

—Judith Valente author of Inventing An Alphabet, Discovering Moons and How To Be A Contemplative, forthcoming in 2026, as well as The Art of Pausing: Meditations for the Overworked and Overwhelmed, a book of haiku and reflections.

Patrick T. Reardon reminds us to look at the people about us, at the city in motion, those sleeping on park benches, those who are stars, those who dream amidst them. With a dose of the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth and the wordsmithing of Studs Terkel, this Chicago journalist of the cosmos helps show us a city as an ever-evolving organism of the consciousness, evoking the quiet places, with their secret histories, oral histories that never get heard, the greatest of short stories that take place in the quiet places, between the waterfront, blues bars, and streets, throughout the beatitudes of our minds.  Read Every Marred Thing: A Time in America.
—Benjamin Shepard, author of On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and Conflicts and Illuminations on Market Street.