Written in the form of memoir or an old time shipping log, Pain Diary: Working Methadone &amp; The Life &amp; 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 &amp; 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.

Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half

Literature & Fiction

Reich, Joseph D.

Poetry

Brick Road Poetry Press

How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems

Hog Press

Aphoristic Variations Volume I of IIIEclecticism defines the work of prolific author Joseph D. Reich. This trilogy is a cross-genre exploration plumbing the depths of human growth and development. This psychological pain diary of surreal stanzas overflows with hard-hitting aphorisms. Reich's stream-of-consciousness invective illuminates every crooked facet of the American Dream, recalling Henry Miller's venomous take on this country as an "Air-Conditioned Nightmare."Reich aims to uncover and heal the profound damage, pain, and loss which life inflicts on the ever-suffering soul of modern man. He leaves no stone unturned, touching upon family dysfunction, abnormal psychology, parapsychology, existentialism, linguistics, and the psycho-dynamics of the fragile human condition.The absurdity of this country's increasingly nihilistic social landscape is Reich's poetic tapestry. His missives are equally tinted by philosophy and sociology, creating a surrealistic guide that is sure to strike a chord with both cynics and optimists, or simply anyone--which is to say everyone--leading lives of "quiet desperation."

The Trouble With Authority: a psychological memoir & field guide on how to survive the maddening erratic behavior of mankind (Aphoristic Variations)

Makeshift Press

Connecting The Dots To Shangrila is a poetic memoir of maxims and manifestos, intertwining themes of society and culture, the psychodynamics of damage in abnormal psychology, the dysfunctional family unit, role-playing in the workplace and psychosocial environment — sometimes from the point-of-view of a social worker, sometimes a 'wasted and wired' husband or father, and more times than not, a desperate, diehard poet, exploring the absurd and excessive forms of postmodern America.Reich is a social observer, something of a thief-scholar and wanderer constantly lingering (disenfranchised) just outside culture, describing a strange strip mall society in all its distorted, brainwashed, ritualistic, delusional splendor.

Connecting the Dots to Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural History of America

Fomite

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Books by Reich, Joseph D.