Interstate Chokehold
Frank Reardon
About the Author
Frank Reardon has published several poetry collections including Cancer Face, Exorcism Of The Con-Artist and Rival Tongues. His work has appeared in such magazines and webzines as New York Quarterly, Quillbillies, Black Listed, Epic Rites, Denver Syntax and Kill Poet. Interstate Chokehold is his first major collection.
“Frank Reardon works words like a hungry young prizefighter, creating killer combinations that produce knock out verse. Areal contender, the kid’s a triple threat with heart, style and class. An up and comer to be reckoned with.”
—S.A. Griffin, Co-Editor, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
ISBN 978-0-9819984-4-2
224 pages
$18.95
5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound, paper
Excerpt
The Open Road of Your Bookcase
When a man has nothing but his
name and a mouthful of words, no
money just personal hate and inner
famine, when the road opens up in
front of his old beat up shoes, the
possibilities become limitless. The
cynics and elitists vanish. Those
doubt soaked ladies become tiny
incidents. The memories decide not
to pan out and the jobs could be
anything: fisherman, lumberjack,
miner, store clerk, or the priest
of a lonely heart.
The road is experience and truth.
It's the place of one thousand ghosts.
It becomes the palace of your open
mast (the one you simplify with true
grit and courage.) When a man has
simple things like notebooks, pens,
selected music, and powerful works
from the typewriter, he can see people
stripped to the bone. He can see a
man's blood pump on the outside. He
can tell what comfort really does for
the people of the arm chair relax. Art
never had a bigger challenge than that
of true passion taken by feet that truly
need to see the earth.
To see and to meet, to plunge the
knife in deeply, to taste and to seek.
I shall gain this knowledge by rafting
across the great colony of despair and
seeing the real suffering. The real deal
all over, not to look within the same
walls of one, two, or three towns, I shall
listen to similar winds across the plains
of my own sorrows and gain the slick
confidence that most will not even
attempt to try. I'm not better or worse,
but I seek formal gain and a card
player’s smile. When I leave your
town I will open my brain and suck in
your truths, and before I leave upon this
road again, I shall leave myself upon
the shelves of your bookcase.
Reviews
“Frank Reardon is a truly exceptional young poet currently rising up from the bowels of the internet. One could compare his work to prominent street poets of past generations, but it would be unfair to lump him in with anyone, for his work has no problem standing on its own merit.”
—John Dorsey, Teaching the Dead to Sing (Rose of Sharon Press)
“Frank Reardon is a prophet, word brawler and unapologetic caller of society’s bullshit. His words are brutally honest and can take you places you didn’t know existed or weren’t comfortable traveling to alone. One of the best voices of our generation.”
—Richard Daley, Co-Founder / Co-Editor, Off Beat Pulp Magazine
“Frank Reardon is a heart beating through impenetrable odds. His writing reaches into your skin, grabs your bones and asks you to dive head first off the cliffs of fear and fragility into the vulnerable sky of our empathetic space and time. Reardon is a carnival barker of the big tent show of love. His terrain is large and small at the same time. His language is a river and you swim in it until you reach the ocean of who you are.”
—Scott Wannberg, Strange Movie Full of Death (Perceval Press)
“Always a pen in hand and a woman on his mind, Frank’s poems are like smashing your face into a mirror and then reflecting on what just happened; looking at yourself in the few shards that remain.”
—Jason Hardung, The Broken and the Damned (Epic Rites Press)
