Robert Seminara

The Unreliable Narrator and the Raven-haired Girl Robert Seminara

A dark romp through the miseries of emotional disorders sublimated by military conscription is the poetic anthology of a Raven-haired girl by a self-styled Unreliable Narrator. It spares family relationships, sexual attacks by pedophiliac priests, obesity, and drug addiction. The author's self-esteem is reduced by unsuccessful psychotherapy and antidepressants. It is tortured soul, who does not believe his life is worth insuring. Limericks with flashes of humor frolic through a quagmire of misfortune as the poet accurately criticizes the disingenuity of promoting a drinking culture without chronicling its destructive aftermath. The Raven-haired Girl cannot be appropriately characterized as a maudlin mess; instead, it analogizes the poet's struggle for dignity through allegory of lost love as he envisages a heaven filled with ravens and wine instead of angels and doves. There is a seriousness to heartache, loss and addiction that no one can argue even an Unreliable Narrator.