How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems

This is the large, coffee-table book version (8.5x11). In Joseph D. Reich’s most recent book of poetry, ‘How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis, ’ he colorfully and cleverly narrates in confessional, narrative and stream-of-consciousness style and form, the troubling and often maddening, ‘absurd, ’ social and cultural landscape of present day, contemporary America, combining a whole wide array of different eclectic genres from poetry to prose to satire to aphoristic writing to existential plays to philosophical and social-cultural essays, in order to bring this anguished and profound point home. He simultaneously plays the role of both lone, solitary protagonist and ragged raconteur, as well as wanderer and social observer, disenfranchised, alienated, always just outside a seemingly very single-minded, co-dependent culture, which appears obsessively bent on all its gadgets and gizmos, self-interest, self-importance, and vulgar and obvious materialism, eventually, ironically, developing something of a collective, distorted thought pattern and even delusional behavior. Reich satirically uncovers and exposes all of the rude and ignorant masks, contradictions, and role-playing of human nature, which appears to make up and infestate the landscape of modern-day America