Pain Diary

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, confessional poems. Both are set in sea-faring locations: New Bedford and Plymouth. "Working Methadone," evocatively begins with a section entitled "Call Me Ishmael. I Mean...Call Me, Ishmael!" and is set in a methadone clinic. 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. While "Pain Diary" is a clinical term for the log kept by patients and clients to detail the moments when they feel most desperate, the term is also an excellent descriptive for Reich's poetry of raw emotion in language that is, at one and the same time, natural, spontaneous and desperate--the language of survival.