Bøger af Joseph D Reich

Written in the form of memoir or an old time shipping log, Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half can be viewed as two free-flowing, stream of consciousness, confessional poems. Both are set in sea-faring locations: New Bedford, home of Herman Melville and birthplace of Moby Dick; and Plymouth, where the Pilgrims settled alongside the Indian tribes of Massachusetts. "Working Methadone," evocatively begins with a section entitled "Call Me Ishmael. I Mean...Call Me, Ishmael!" and is set in a methadone clinic directly across from the Moby Dick Marina. A group home for adolescents provides the background for "The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half." In both, Joseph Reich, poet and social worker, explores his work experience with the "chemically dependent," the alienated and ostracized, and integrates it with his own cathartic empathy. Influenced by and echoing such wide-ranging and eclectic sources as Whitman, Cummings, Plath, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Jim Morrison, among many others, Reich's style and point of view rises out of his own years on the road when, as Bob Dylan put it, "the only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keeping on," which included such jobs as cab driver, grave digger, roofer, long-haul trucker, and, "for a bit of a time, hustling the streets in the black market of San Francisco." While "Pain Diary" is a clinical term for the log kept by patients and clients to detail the moments when they feel most desperate and in crisis, the term is also an excellent descriptive for this one-of-a-kind poetry that seems to spring out of raw emotion in language that is, at one and the same time, natural, spontaneous and desperate--the language of survival.

"From Premonition To Prophecy" is a three volume set of sociology, philosophy, and psychology of aphoristic writing, all written in poetic stanzas, sometimes of social and cultural satire, character analysis, topographical essays, manifestos, maxims and proverbs, which provide support and guidance for one's everyday pain and suffering, motivation, inspiration, and empowerment, especially for those unjustly alienated, criminalized, ostracized, and disenfranchised from their psychosocial environment and what we deem to be contemporary culture and society.

"From Premonition To Prophecy" is a three volume set of sociology, philosophy, and psychology of aphoristic writing, all written in poetic stanzas, sometimes of social and cultural satire, character analysis, topographical essays, manifestos, maxims and proverbs, which provide support and guidance for one's everyday pain and suffering, motivation, inspiration, and empowerment, especially for those unjustly alienated, criminalized, ostracized, and disenfranchised from their psychosocial environment and what we deem to be contemporary culture and society.

"From Premonition To Prophecy" is a three volume set of sociology, philosophy, and psychology of aphoristic writing, all written in poetic stanzas, sometimes of social and cultural satire, character analysis, topographical essays, manifestos, maxims and proverbs, which provide support and guidance for one's everyday pain and suffering, motivation, inspiration, and empowerment, especially for those unjustly alienated, criminalized, ostracized, and disenfranchised from their psychosocial environment and what we deem to be contemporary culture and society.

In Joseph Reich's most recent social and cultural, contemporary satire of suburbia entitled, "The Housing market: a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world," the author addresses the absurd, postmodern elements of what it means, or for that matter not, to try and cope andfunction, and survive and thrive, or live and die in the repetitive and existential, futile and self-destructive, homogenized, monochromatic landscape of a brutal and bland, collective unconscious, which can spiritually result in a conflict and crisis of a desperate, disproportionate 'situational depression, ' triggering and leading the narrator to feel constantly abandoned and stranded, more concretely or proverbially spoken, "the eternal stranger," where when caught between the fight or flight psychological phenomena, naturally repels him and causes him to flee and return without him even knowing it into the wild, which by sudden circumstance andcoincidence discovers it surrounds the illusory-like circumference of these selfsame Monopoly board cul-de-sacs and dead ends... Most specifically, what can happen to a solitary, thoughtful and independent thinker when being stagnated in the triangulation of a cookie-cutter, oppressive culture of a homeowner's association he never ever really wanted when attempting to offer a piece of 'the absurd' American Dream to his wife who he loves and adores and never had it; when the house eventually goes on the market for its third, fourth, and fifth year of a collapsed and "depressed" economy; A memoir all written in critical and didactic, poetic stanzas and passages, and out of desperation, when freedom and control get taken, what he is forced to do in the illusion of 'free will and volition, ' something like the derivative art of an ironic and social, cultural satir

"These 'insomniac episodes' consist of 84 tantalizing descriptions of hallucinated Magritte murals, painted on the inside of poet Joseph Reich's sleepless eyelids."--Back cover.

Poet Joseph Reich writes from a great inner pressure of experience and memory. His senses are open to an America frozen in a forever unconsummated act of rotting; with humor, empathy, and a vast, restless energy, his experience bursts out, capturing the fleeting world in a poetic bubble with an almost painterly repletion, so that for a moment it becomes whole and tangible, authentic both to the outer reality to which it is a touching tribute, and to his own nature.