This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Diana Raab will be awarding a $20 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
An Imaginary Affair is a collection of sensitive and sensuous poems for poets and non-poets who appreciate the challenges and intricacies of being human.
The poems touch on key human elements, such as love, desire, passion, memory, loss, and gratitude. The poet celebrates the joys, and pains inherent to a woman's heart, while honoring the wisdoms and tones of Neruda's poetry. Some of the epistolary poems are directed to Neruda in response to his riveting poems.
“In this intimate collection of poems, Diana Raab pays tribute to the sensual physicality of Pablo Neruda’s work and to her own real and invented lives. With unvarnished honesty, An Imaginary Affair celebrates a woman’s heart and mind through a handful of odes, epistolary poems, and the idea that memory and anticipation can sustain and nourish us; even drinking a glowing hot toddy is transformed into a meditation on how an ordinary act can awaken desire. Her unvarnished honesty gives equal attention to matters of mortality, where loss is lyrically considered (“…will you run from me / when trains sleep at their stations”), and also explored in the spirit of open curiosity (“How long does it take / for a pine casket to disintegrate / in this caving land…). These poems remind us that to be alive is to try and balance joy and lament, and how through this effort we more deeply inhabit the world and ourselves.” –Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia and Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara
Enjoy an Excerpt
My Heart Broke Loose with the Wind
My Heart Broke Loose With the Wind
On the pages of a Khalil Gibran journal
my voice was freed—the wind squalled
through my brain beaten
down by words, abusive.
Such liberation possessed me wholly.
His revelation bloomed,
so unlike my mother’s mutterings
as she drifted in and out of madness.
My lines, at ten, engendered
many other poems holding and healing
me—once so deeply shattered.
Those words now yearning for the divine
just like the prophet Khalil Gibran.
About the Author:
Raab has written over 1000 articles and poems including her contributions to Psychology Today, Thrive Global, Wisdom Daily and many others. She has taught at UCLA Extension, the Santa Barbara's Writer's Conference, 1440 Multiversity, Hugo House and others.
Her chapbook, An Imaginary Affair: Poems Whispered to Neruda is written in response to his work.
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