The surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas of Joseph D. Reich’s 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage, hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism, looking at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly “ridiculous” images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich’s teeming inner world.
Joseph Reich is a social worker and displaced New Yorker who lives with his wife and eleven-year-old 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).