Book of Aliases

Book of Aliases examines the question of who we are from the perspective of our multiple identities, some of which are common and others which are quite personal and individual. It takes the view that we must become aware of these many aspects of our self, many of which are rather contradictory, and use them to form a more informed process of self-actualization.

Book of Aliases is the history of too much possibility within one person. It is an attempt to deal with the fragmentation of a puzzle where the pieces don’t all go together yet we somehow still manage to perceive ourselves as a cohesive single individual that other people should be able to understand just as well as we seem to think we do. All this is in spite of the fact that there are moments where we say to ourselves “wow, where did that come from” or “what did I do that for?” The best I can tell you is that it might help to understand that we are much more fragmentary then we think. Maybe if we can think of all these separate and, in fact disparate, parts of ourselves as dolls that all live in the huge mansion of our lives, we can quit the futile task of trying to make sense of ourselves. As you read the poems in this book, you can forget the questions and begin to focus instead on each of the parts, seeing each one of them as a kind of answer that we can grow to be comfortable with as we live in the now of the magical realm of poetry. It is important that we become comfortable with our parts and we forget about the necessity of making it all make sense because the truth is that we are fragmentary beings who live in a fragmentary world. It is my hope that this book will help you to do that!

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Russell H. Ragsdale was born in California in 1944, educated at the University of Arizona and lived for many years in Tucson, Arizona. He has been a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan since 1992. He has nearly forty years in the food industry with eighteen years as a retail meat cutter followed by fifteen years as an executive chef. He has been writing poetry since the early sixties. In the past few years he has started teaching English and is currently an English language teacher at the Kazakh Institute for Management, Economics, and Strategic Planning. He has published many newspaper articles, and is a contributor to Doing Business With Kazakhstan, Kogan Page, London, 2003. He speaks several languages and has performed in theater, as a guest on numerous television shows, and as an actor in several commercials and movies.