At its core, my imaginary old man: poems is about desire. Desire for relationship. Desire for stability. Desire for authentic reality. The poems are spoken through an unnamed speaker who spins surrealistic verses that revolve around his enigmatic imaginary old man. The imaginary old man is nebulous, changing form with—and sometimes within—each poem. At times mythic, whittling wives from birch or carrying a moth-filled suitcase, other times extremely real and present, he is marked by flit and flight: he arrives, but not as often as he leaves. The poems’ mirror the speaker’s sense of absence and ambivalence through their aversion of clear end stops and punctuation that allows certain lines, phrases, and even the separate poems to run together and be read in multiple ways, creating a prismatic effect. The collection is also an exercise in form, the majority of poems playing in decasyllabics in addition to a group of prose pieces and modified haikus. The formal elements and language work to illustrate and illuminate a speaker who is simultaneously responding to and constructing a figure to fill its want, yet is only able to imagine the imaginary old man.

About the Author

Born in Spokane, WA, Ryan Sharp spent most of his youth bouncing around the Pacific Northwest before his family set roots in Portland, OR. There he received his MFA in Writing from Pacific University while teaching English at a charter high school outside of Portland. Currently living in Austin, TX with his beautiful wife, Abigail, and two children, Judah and Eden, he is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where his research focuses on contemporary Black American persona poetry and how it is being employed to resist and revise archival representations of Blackness. He also teaches and serves as the Writers' Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University, a Historically Black University in East Austin. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several journals including Berkeley Poetry Review, Callaloo, Copper Nickel, DIALOGIST, and PANK. He has been the editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review since 2013.

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