|
The Housing Market
The Housing Market:
a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world
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 and
function, 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 gradual wasting away and erosion of the senses
or 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,
while by sudden circumstance and coincidence 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; 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 a smart and ironic and social and cultural satire.
Fomite Press
The Derivation of Cowboys & Indians
The Derivation of Cowboys & Indians represents a profound journey, a breakdown of The American Dream from a social, cultural, historical, and spiritual point of view. Reich examines in concise detail the loss of the collective unconscious, commenting on our contemporary postmodern culture with its self-interested excesses, on where and how things all go wrong, and how social/political practice rarely meets its original proclamations and promises. Reich's surreal and self-effacing satire brings this troubling message home. The Derivation of Cowboys & Indians is a desperate search and struggle for America's literal, symbolic, and spiritual home.
Fomite Press
Joseph Reich is a children's therapist who works in the state of Vermont;
A displaced New Yorker who sincerely does miss dis-place, most of all the Thai
Food, the Bagels, and the Smoothies on Houston Street...
Has a wife and child and when we all get a little older desire to show them around Harlem,
The Upper West Side, The Lower East Side, and boroughs of birth and childhood...
Joseph has had works which have appeared in such literary journals as, Poesy, Dispatch,
Falling Star, And Then, Graffiti Rag, Main Street Rag, Bouillabaisse, Decanto,
Rogue's Scholar, Poetry Motel, The Beat, The Potomac Poetry Super Highway
and Istanbul Literature Review.
Email: Joseph Reich
Return to Table of Contents
|
