Sublime Physick

Patrick Madden is a professor at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Disparates: Essays (Nebraska, 2020) and Quotidiana: Essays (Nebraska, 2014), and coeditor, with David Lazar, of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. His essays have appeared in a variety of periodicals as well as in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Visit Madden’s website at quotidiana.org.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsSpitFisica SublimeEntering and BreakingIn Media VitaEmpathyMiser’s FarthingsBuying a BassMoment, Momentous, MomentumOn Being RecognizedFor the Last TimeIndependent RedundancyFixity

“No one writing essays today does so with a greater awareness of the genre’s literary traditions than Patrick Madden. Irresistible, with their meditative musicality and erudite reflections, these essays brilliantly balance a tough-minded pragmatism with a warm embrace of the impossible. Like all the great essayists he pays homage to, Madden seeks to find the miraculous in the mundane, the sublime in the ordinary, the hazards lurking in our momentary contentment. He understands perfectly why Emerson thought the joy of essaying lay in surprise: to surprise their readers, essayists must first surprise themselves.”-Robert Atwan, series editor of The Best American Essays “It’s like Montaigne and Sebald got drunk and wrote a book together.”-Brian Doyle, author of Mink River and Leaping  "[Sublime Physick is] a collection of moments that culminate in lives both exalted and ordinary."-Amanda Forbes Silva, Ploughshares “Ingenious and witty, audacious and charming, learned, moving, and frank: Patrick Madden’s Sublime Physick places him among the most interesting and essential essayists of our time.”-Mary Cappello, author of Awkward: A Detour and Called Back "A fun and funny book."-Joe Plicka, Dialogue "Reading Madden’s meta-writings on his own writing is like listening to a magician revealing his tricks, yet he always holds the upper hand."-E.V. De Cleyre, Brevity “Patrick Madden combines, to a rare degree, a scholar’s knowledge and an artist’s command of the essay as a literary form. In his hands, the essay becomes a medium for pondering and celebrating our mysterious existence. Readers who wish to reflect more deeply on their own lives will find abundant rewards in these pages.”-Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays "To read a Patrick Madden essay is to interface with the mind of an engaged, self-conscious thinker. Actually, that's not quite right: It is to interface with Madden's curation of the minds of many thinkers within the expanse of his own."-John Proctor, NumÉro Cinq "The essays in Sublime Physick are more than self-reflective; they connect internal states with the marvelous world."-RenÉe E. D'Aoust, Inside Higher Ed