The Rituals of Mummification Cover

Poet Joseph Reich writes from a great inner pressure of experience and memory. His senses are open to an America frozen in a forever unconsummated act of rotting; with humor, empathy, and a vast, restless energy, his experience bursts out, capturing the fleeting world in a poetic bubble with an almost painterly repletion, so that for a moment it becomes whole and tangible, authentic both to the outer reality to which it is a touching tribute, and to his own nature.

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, been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize, and his books in poetry and cultural studies include:

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“Armed with the resignation of Bret Easton Ellis and the empathy of Henry Chinaski, Reich wryly grapples with the weight of nostalgia in 21st-century America. The Rituals of Mummification is a bullet train, crashing through the Smithsonian in the night.”

—Adam Van Alstyne, Editor, Gambling the Aisle

The Rituals of Mummification takes you on a journey through the mess of modernity, transporting you through strange and wonderful time warps somehow familiar and abstract all at once. Snippets of daily life mingle with introspective musings and the ennui of the everyday. In this work we see the echoes of ourselves, and it isn’t all sunshine and roses…. This is poetry for everyone, accessible and concrete. Each piece almost feels a ritual, setting you firm in the notion that you are not alone in your experience, or your discontent.”

The Poetry Question