Book Signing Local Author Diana Raab

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

Diana Raab, PhD is a memoirist, poet, essayist, blogger, and speaker. She presents workshops in writing for healing and transformation. She has a PhD in Psychology with a concentration in Transpersonal Psychology with a research focus on the healing and transformative powers of memoir writing. Her educational background also includes health administration, nursing and creative writing.

Diana has been writing since an early age. As an only child of two immigrant parents, she spent a lot of time crafting letters and chronicling her life in a journal. As an advocate of personal writing, Diana facilitates workshops in writing for transformation and empowerment, focusing on journaling, poetry and memoir writing. She believes in the importance of writing to achieve wholeness and interconnectedness while encouraging the ability to unleash the true voice of the inner self.

She teaches two courses on “DailyOM: Write. Heal. Transform: A Magical Memoir Writing Course” and “Therapeutic Writing.”

She’s an award-winning author of 10 books, over 1000 articles and poems, and editor of two anthologies, Writers on the Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency, and Writers and Their Notebooks.

Raab’s two memoirs are Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal and Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey. She has 4 poetry collections, including Lust.

Her latest books are Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life and Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books or wherever books are sold.

Her poetry chapbook, An Imaginary Affair: Poems whispered to Neruda is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press

“Written in response to lines by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, these poems have a daring directness and vulnerability. These are not poems that hide their emotion behind artifice. They explore the beginnings – and inevitable endings – of attraction with a tender and elemental honesty.”

~ Sue William Silverman, author, If the Girl Never Learns

“An imaginary affair is more than a conversation with Neruda’s poems. In this book, Diana Raab unveils trauma, desire, her life experience (“I am ready to wave goodbye to memories/and bow to gratitude”), and her passionate, non-imaginary affair with poetry. The language is sensual, synesthetic, and at the same time restrained, precise (“flecks of lemon rind float about this whiskey/swirled with honey from the bee that loves/that buzz you give me”). With subtlety and determination An Imaginary Affair invites the reader to enter the intimacy of poetry; its wisdom (“And we move together slowly, one step/at a time toward another dance, another life”).

~ Mariano Zaro, author of Decoding Sparrows

“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