In my dreams/I love like an idea

Winner of the 2022 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest

Tyler Raso

You can purchase the physical book from Barnes & Noble here.

You can purchase the physical book from Bookshop here.

Leave a review of the chapbook on Goodreads here.

Welcome to the fifth collection in our chapbook series! Frontier is proud that our chapbook contest has brought to light such strong and exciting works by emerging poets that we can champion through publication in the form of free digital chapbooks. We want as many people as possible to be able read Tyler Raso's poems. Please feel free to download and share below!

SYNOPSIS

In my dreams/I love like an idea is a wandering reckoning with living, loving, and medicalized mental illness. The collection begins with a diagnosis with Bipolar Disorder, and spills from there, rupturing toward rest, tenderness, togetherness, breath, and against prescription-as Raso bleeds together the personal and the clinical, the telescopic and the microscopic, the avoidant and the intimate. Parodying the voices and forms of self-help, self-care, and psychiatry, Raso injects lyric into the boxes crafted to confine those diagnosed. Sometimes diary, sometimes debris, sometimes love song, In my dreams/I love like an idea is a poetry chapbook obsessed with being alive, and exploring the sore and quiet places where its aliveness touches the world.

ABOUT the AUTHOR

Tyler Raso (they/them) is a poet, essayist, and teacher who feels most at home near rivers. Their work has shared space with POETRY, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter Journal, Split Lip Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. They are often wandering, unraveling, or both—but you can reach them on Twitter @spaghettiutopia or through their website, tylerraso.com.

PRAISE

"In my dreams / I love like an idea is a book that pursues these contradictions and paradoxes: the voice is direct, the music is the music of speech, the feeling is complex and conflicted. That’s why this book, in its quiet integrity, is a stay against confusion, provides solace that is credible, and strives to tell the truth all the way to the bottom—and as these poems convincingly and skillfully demonstrate, the bottom is a long way down."

—Tom Sleigh, 2022 Chapbook Judge

"Tyler Raso’s In my dreams/I love like an idea is a tender, textured exploration of the bipolar self and the shadows it casts. It is a secret song of the body as an earthquake of feathers and a seed pouch full of rain, searching for a new way to say I am alive amidst the relations between body, beloveds, and mental health strictures."

—Jennifer S. Cheng, Author of House A

"In their debut chapbook, Tyler Raso seizes the languages of therapy, self-care, and self-help and turns them inside out: “See the person you want to be: When you look in the mirror, see a map of every place it is currently raining.” In poem after poem, their fuckery with form is a delight, but the wit never comes at the expense of feeling.”

—Nicky Beer, Author of The Octopus Game

"In my dreams/I love like an idea is a necessary book, a shimmering song to selfhood, mental health, loving, poetry, togetherness: “That I can say, I am running a few minutes late, construction, blue sunlight, the map of a palm, I will meet you at joy soon.”

—Jane Wong, Author of How Not to Be Afraid of Everything

"At once grounding and jarring, Raso guides us through a profound, poetic architecture of life and love with mental illness. The poems in their book In my dreams/I love like an idea ask readers to consider what it means to be worthy of love, while exploring what it is for a fossil to bloom with the history of itself."

—Joan Kwon Glass, Author of Night Swim