“Pulp of rind, same as pulp of flesh… Won’t be long, until that’s all we’ll have left…” This stanza of the first poem of Marc Rubendall’s new photo book Shambles in Brandy’d Wine encapsulates the deteriorating ramshackle state of small town America through the viewfinder of his old polaroid camera and scribbled notes dripping with blood, booze, and vivid streams of consciousness. Rubendall captures Brandywine Valley at it is, as much as it used to be: A thriving part of the USA’s industrialized eco-system, now nothing more than a burial ground of scattered bones buried by greedy land developers and venture capitalists. Rubendall chases ghosts across the barren landscapes of dilapidated barns and rotten crop fields, pairing his dusty polaroids with the prose acting as an abstract eulogy for the ghosts of the past. Rubendall takes readers everywhere, from splintered parts of suffering Southeast PA, to the Dupont polluted ponds of Delaware, documenting the extinction of a place that used to be full of fruits of a farmer’s labor, old stretches of dying white picket fence towns that once bustled with life, and gutted steel cities now rusted and abandoned. The “Shambles” the title refers to is also a reflection of Rubendall himself at the time the poetry was conceived. Written a decade earlier when he was trapped deep in throes of a drinking habit and few prospects, he eventually came to a similar split path the Brandywine Valley did; Caught between a dark alluring past and an uncertain future. But unlike the places in this book; He picked the right path and eventually found the light.