The Taste of Gruel
By Joseph D. Reich
Joseph D. Reich’s “pain diary,” written during a spell of hospitalization, is as free of illusion as it is freely nostalgic. Across seventy-odd numbered sections interrupted by case studies, figures, alternative proofs, bulletpoints, and clinical conclusions, Reich turns the language of institutional care back on itself. A virtual nurse practitioner hovers invisibly to ask whether he is feeling moody or depressed; a dietitian arrives in the middle of the night with egg salad; higher-ups hold meetings about meetings about meetings. Beyond the window are the mountains of Vermont, and farther, an America ruinously engraving its distorted self-image on its own remains.
And yet, in bed—for Reich as for Proust, the poem’s dedicatee—memories come unbidden: sugar packets at a bed & breakfast, baseball cards wrapped in wax paper, childhood AM radio, ragtime saving a broken soul in New Orleans, a girl with green Irish eyes… Reich sets all that life has managed to keep warm against the brutal systematic indifference we inflict on each other. Amorous, funny, furious, tender, The Taste of Gruel is about what survives.
Joseph Reich is a social worker and displaced New Yorker who lives with his wife and son up in the high mountains of Vermont. He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad, and been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize. He is the author of many books, including A Different Sort Of Distance (Skive Magazine Press, 2010), If I Told You To Jump Off The Brooklyn Bridge (Flutter Press, 2010), Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2010), Drugstore Sushi (Thunderclap Press, 2010), Escaping Shangrila (Punkin Press, 2011), The Derivation of Cowboys and Indians (Fomite Press, 2012), The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world (Fomite Press, 2013), The Hole That Runs Through Utopia (Fomite Press, 2014), Taking The Fifth And Running With It: A Psychological Guide for the Hard of Hearing and Blind (Broadstone Books, 2015), and Connecting the Dots to Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural History of America (Fomite Press, 2016).