The Road to Emmaus

August 4, 2014
Reece, in his follow-up to 2001's The Clerk's Tale, displays virtues may not be rare, taken individually, but are unique in their combination; writing about placesâin Florida, New England, Europeâwith sardonic detail, and telling stories of people who might be at home in Henry James. Reece has an eye for the bizarre, but strives to sum things up as he addresses love between men, middle age, and worldly disappointment with raw feeling, and he directs his passion not only outward and inward, but upward, towards the Christian God. In a 17-part meditation about Reece's former partner in Florida, ducks on a pond "quack-quacked,/ copulating into oblivion as if sex were religion./ When I could not reach what I loved,/ the world was rent." When Reece released his celebrated debut he was a menswear salesman in Palm Beach; he has now been ordained as an Episcopal priest (a memoir is forthcoming). That journey from one place to another, one vocation to another, informs the whole book, which encompasses self-disgust but begins and ends with compassion, from "the neonatal ICU" (where Reece served as a hospital chaplain) to a walk in a park, and a gay marriage, in New York, where "The Gospel of John was right:/ the world holds so much life."

April 1, 2014
The most exceptional poems in this engaging collection are long and not just personal but autobiographical. The Road to Emmaus is about two men on the same journey, himself when young and his much older AA sponsor. We see Reece in counseling with an elderly nun, recalling his sole love relationship, which began when he was 39 and Joseph was 50 and lasted five years. In the prose poem, Hartford, Reece, older yet, is a hospital chaplain in the city of his birth, pondering the Jewish past of his mother's family and traces of Wallace Stevens, Hartford's great resident poet when it was a WASP, not a black, metropolis. And in The Upper Room, Reece shows himself studying in middle age for the Episcopal priesthoodhis second crack at it, successful this time, though he is wracked by a wave of deaths in his family. With their allusive titles and citations, all four conjure a gritty world scarred by disruptions good (gay liberation) and bad (urban poverty, violence, madness) yet suffused with poetry, love, and the Gospel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)