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.
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
Please Don’t Forget Me
I want you to know
one thing:
if there is ever a day
when you begin to think
about my place in this world
and if I could live without you —
stop in your tracks,
and look the imprints
your feet made in the sand
where you and I walked together
arm in arm, side by side
shoulder touching shoulder.
You are ingrained in my brain
like every kernel of sand
that lies beside the largest ocean
in this world where we inhabit
two sides familiar, yet foreign
to one another. But, in the end,
I had to let you go: when you love
someone it’s what one must do —
set them free to do what they need
or want, and when they want
to do it, whether it is with you or not—
while always keeping in mind
I will never in my lifetime or yours
stop loving everything about you.
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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