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.
About the Author: Joseph Reich is a social worker who works out in the state of Massachusetts; a displaced New Yorker who sincerely does miss diss-place, most of all the Thai food, Shanghai Joe's in Chinatown, the fresh smoothies on Houston Street, and bagels and bialy's of The Lower East Side. He has a wife and handsome little boy with a nice mop of dirty-blonde hair, and when they all get a bit older, hopes to take them back to play, to pray, and contemplate in the parks and playgrounds of New York City. He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad and his most recent books include, A Different Sort Of Distance (Skive Magazine Press), If I Told You To Jump Off The Brooklyn Bridge (Flutter Press), The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians (Poet Works Press), Obscure Aphorisms Written On A Fine Overcast Day (Lummox Press), Escaping Shangrila (Punkin House Press), Drugstore Sushi (Thunderclap Press), Bally's: A Didactic Case Study On The Human Species (Alternating Current Co-op), and The Path Of The Crow (Alternating Current Co-op).