Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 - Softcover

Joseph is an attorney as well as a poet, which accounts for the legal tone of the title of his retrospective collection, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos. Joseph also has a penchant for reasoning, yet these are molten works, and reading through his earlier poems is to journey through his poetic and philosophical development. Beneath the stable crust of memory is a search for identity. Joseph delves into his ancestry by considering his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic grandparents' homelands and history, and their place as Arab emigrants in the U.S. Through reflection on this heritage and the violence of his Detroit childhood, Joseph ponders anger, choice, and fate. Into It, which collects his newest work, reveals a different poetic voice, one that is more abstract and fluid. Here Joseph is less narrative-based and more symbolic, less angry and more disillusioned, less personal and more universal. Many lyrics seem "coded" with essayistic digressions that gracefully intertwine question, observation, and emotion. Being a New Yorker in a 9/11 world has certainly resonated with Joseph, and the melancholy, grief, and hope of so many people coming to grips with large-scale violence is palpable. Many of these poems are deftly painted (perhaps an influence from his painter wife) with feeling as brushstroke, judgment as perspective, language as dimension, metaphor as theme. Janet St. John
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