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.