Ryan Sharp

My Imaginary Old Man Ryan Sharp

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.