Travels With The Anti-Johnny Appleseed

“Every word he speaks comes straight from an unedited core of being” – these words from Raj Dronamraju’s third book of poetry TRAVELS WITH THE ANTI-JOHNNY APPLESEED could be said to describe Dronamraju’s own words. But here, the “core of being” is not necessarily Raj’s own self. Rather, moving from possibly autobiographical elements of a narrator’s past and remembered culture in the first of three parts, the second part presents something of the de-centered views of culture itself in the present era–often from an unfiltered and non-judgmental perspective–but revealing political, religious and cultural attitudes all the same. Here the cultural Zeitgeist speaks like internet surfing, TV channel switching, or scanning bulletin board notices. And like some dialectical merging of past and present, the future erupts in the third and last part of Raj’s book as a merging of personal and cultural memory with an inverted recollection of the future to come: hopes and dreams and possible nightmares as well for a personal history–an imperfect future recalled with wit and wisdom. As a coherent cohesive collection of poems, TRAVELS WITH THE ANTI-JOHNNY APPLESEED creates a gestalt experience where the whole is greater than its parts, and dogmatic attitudes are shot down with iconoclastic precision.