THE PHILOSOPHY OF AS IF is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth, but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere, direct truth-telling. However poems are also fictions, and deal with what might be. Poets behave as if the world matches their models. The poems in this collection play on tension between desire and disillusion, between actuality and fantasy. The real yields what might be: the actual becomes the imaginary.

Fraser Sutherland is a much travelled Nova Scotian who now lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has published sixteen books, including poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in Canada and the United States. His work has appeared worldwide in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and has been translated into French, Italian, Albanian, Serbian, and Farsi. Before he became a freelance writer and editor, Sutherland reported for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Wall Street Journal. He was a founding editor of Northern Journey, a columnist for Quill & Quire, and the managing editor of Books in Canada. A reviewer for The Globe and Mail and other periodicals, Sutherland has written and edited for dictionaries in three countries, and may be the only Canadian writer who is also a lexicographer.

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