In Joseph Reich’s most recent social and cultural, contemporary satire of suburbia, 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.
About the Author
Joseph Reich has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad and is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee. 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), Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half (Brick Road Poetry Press), Drugstore Sushi (Thunderclap Press), The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians, The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world, and The Hole That Runs Through Utopia (Fomite), and Taking The Fifth And Running With It: a psychological guide for the hard of hearing and blind (Broadstone Books).
