Imaginary Friends: Poems

WARNING: These poems are ancient AF. Plato wouldn't let them anywhere near your kids — and neither should you! Intentionally committing fallacies as it dares you to paraphrase its heresies, this debut collection of new and previously published poems deploys absurdist humor, philosophical introspection and a playful disdain for its own embodiment. From narratives about Chicagoland casual encounters involving bacon grease to childhood acid trips as the end of writing, this book explores the line/sentence relation to investigate how our ineluctable acts of representation to recover from trauma reproduce intimate ruptures from which we must recover our potential for representation.

"Like being trapped in a beehive and enjoying it.” - Darin Zimpel, former Poet Laureate of the City of Racine & avid gardener "I think it was the first book that ever made me dizzy from reading it." - Brian Brovelli, IT network systems consultant & the author's second cousin

"Think Elizabeth Bishop recast by a convex mirror; 19th century hypotaxis reflected back as Ashberian tattoo. Pay especial attention to 'Casual Refugee': strophic, borderline anaphora in which echoes of more than one hypothetical sestina fuse into one wholly uncanny sense." - Adam Strauss, Kentucky-based substitute teacher, poet and Chagall fan

Is this spiritual poetry or atheist poetry or agnostic poetry? Hard to say. It's definitely not religious poetry. You'd be hard pressed to call these love poems.

These are difficult poems that are easy to read. But they are also poems that can make grown men cry.

Arguably, great literature and timeless poetry don't come along every day. But there are plenty of poems that directly concern themselves with philosophical problems that have plagued humankind for millennia. This book of poetry falls into at least one of those categories.

If you wonder why none of these experimental poems ever appeared in any of the best poetry anthologies, or why someone hasn't called this author the best contemporary poet, you're probably in very small company.

This short first book includes poems about relationships in the broadest sense. In addition to challenging the fact-value distinction and its position in metaphysics and epistemology, Ravnikar situates his work with both a narrative and lyric voice at the axiological origin to simultaneously use the conventions of academic discourse to reject academic poetry while he underscores the banality of emotion to frustrate our conception of what we consider emotional poetry.

Even though these poems don't use or mention the words "childhood trauma," they nevertheless engage in the process of recovery from the addictions to behaviors that perpetuate the psychological conditions emergent from coping with those same traumatic experiences.

Like many contemporary poetry collections and individual contemporary poems, this volume -- while not necessarily literary masterpieces -- may yet earn the title of political poetry, given its concern with the 21st century's geopolitical and social crises, even as it continues to agonize (with/over) and enact the traditional themes of classic literature: free will vs. determinism (or liberty and necessity), the search for meaning and eternal truths, how human beings are meant to live, and whether greed or selfishness can be turned to good ends.

In attempting to reconcile enduring questions like the alienated subject-object in late capitalism, this book wrestles with questions of semantics like they are God or something. But really, the poet is just a sad boy with a big mouth and a big vocabulary writing sad poems for sad people with big brains. (You have a big brain, too.)

If you've read this poetry book, leave a review below letting other curious readers know what you think!