Diana M. Raab's Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You is not only a tribute to the late diarist, but also a tribute to diaries themselves. Each of the book's poems, culled from Raab's own journal, offers intimate portraitures, tiny memoirs in verse. Raab's poetry is seductive in its earnestness, appealing in its vulnerability, mystery, and enchantment.
Denise Duhamel, poet, author of Two and Two and
Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
Raab's skill is as a poet, but her passages are as intimate as a diary. She reconstructs her past mirroring Nin's emotional honesty. The reader never feels voyeuristic reading the intimate passages, but feels like a confidant, friend and maybe even a lover.
Steve Reigns, Nin scholar, poet, and editor of
My Life is Poetry
In Diana Raab's "imaginary world.people drip with stories / and linger in bookstores and cafés / slurping foamy cappuccinos / and nibbling chocolate cake." And the poems in Dear Anaïs are, indeed, rife with both stories and the extravagantly various things of this world: Laundromats and writers' conferences, steel-tipped boots and champagne, patched jeans and paramedics, blueberries and autographed photos of Paul Newman. While the book does pay homage to Anaïs Nin-to her eroticism and wry humor and exquisite journals-it also vividly evoke's Raab's own life, particularly her family memories. Like Nin, Raab is indefatigable in her desire to commit one woman's life to paper.
David Starkey, author of Ways of Being Dead
Praise for Diana Raab's memoir Regina's Closet:
" Raab makes Regina's Closet a walk-in book, complete with recovered documents and packed with the sumptuous, minute, domestic, tormented and romantic details of one fully-lived life and another plucky life lived in answer to it."
Molly Peacock, poet, author of
Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems
