“Ira Rat’s poetry cuts straight to the core of me. There’s a flow that takes you and suddenly you feel like you were within it before you even started reading. A displacement, it’s hard to feel that we’re not the same melting body that he describes.

Voices from the past are reconstructed in memories that seem like they’re yet to be lived, an inevitability, instinct and paranoia overlapping like waves in a haunted present dream.

The everyday becomes a blur as the writer tells us “my mind keeps slipping / into magical thinking”.

Perfectly weighted verses slip from one to the next, and despite the fear, it’s a joy to feel so thoroughly engulfed, so entirely lost in these lines.”

 — Thomas Moore, author, Alone, Forever, and When People Die

“The Medication is disquieting and powerful. Honestly, like a jolt. Moving fast, the poem clicks along with frantic search for sense, for something solid. But dailiness in this state has elasticity. Glacial hours turn fast and feral. The ordinary tenses with delirium. Line by line, Ira Rat gives us the tour of a mind unraveling but trying to find a way. “I don’t know where / I’m going with this, but / it just keeps going,” and we follow, afraid but spellbound. ”

— Nate Lippens, author, My Dead Book

“Ira’s about the bone; the infrastructure of corporeal daunt. Fuck the blood, he’s been there and done that and now this is where we are. His writing is wicker, articulately fashioned and direct. It looks you straight in the eye—“my mind keeps slipping / into magical thinking”. Listen to your friend as he remains casually vulnerable in this visceral kitchen table exchange.”

—Barracuda Guarisco, author of books and editor of Really Serious Literature

The Medication is Ira Rat’s first new poetry collection in many years. This edition is hand signed/numbered and limited to 100 copies.

 

Cover art by O.B. DE ALESSI

Chapbook, 20 pages, Limited Edition of 100. Hand-compiled by Ira Rat in beautiful Ames, IA. Includes Talented Perverts bookmark, sticker & Ira Rat sticker.