ABOUT

Ryan Drag is a poet, writer, musician, and educator living in New York.

His work moves between the visionary and the everyday, drawing from Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and the Beat tradition. His poetry is particularly influenced by Dylan Thomas, William Wordsworth and Arthur Rimbaud, whose relationships with nature, music, imagination, and language continue to shape his own poetic practice. He works freely between inherited forms—including sonnets and sestinas—and experimental lyric poetry, using rhythm, image, color, mythology, and unexpected associations to explore consciousness, mortality, spirituality, love, nature, and the strange beauty of contemporary life.

His first poetry collection, MAGNET, gathers lyrical and often surreal poems concerned with the subconscious mind, daily meditations on life and death, metaphysics, love, politics, and the sensory experience of living in a complicated world. The collection reflects his interest in poetry as a form of discovery: a way of looking at ordinary experience until something hidden emerges.

Drag’s poetry and cultural writing have appeared in publications in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Mexico, including Love Love Magazine (Paris), Moof Magazine (London), POSTmortem (Mad Gleam Press), Sometimes Magazine, Alt Citizen, Bilingual Literary/Art Journal (Mexico City), and Denim Skin.

He has presented his work at the New York City Poetry Festival and has organized literary readings and cultural events in New York City and Boston. His work as a writer and editor has also included digital music and cultural journalism, publication projects, event production, promotion, and sound engineering.

Music remains central to his creative life. He performs and composes with the psychedelic band Heavy Birds, where his work as a songwriter continues his interest in the relationship between poetry, rhythm, sound, and performance.

Drag is also a dedicated educator. He teaches English and creative writing and believes everyone can write. His teaching emphasizes curiosity, experimentation, close attention to language, and discovering an individual voice. Whether working with beginning writers or experienced poets, he approaches writing as both a craft to study and a way to see the world differently.

He holds a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MFA in Poetry from Lindenwood University.

 

Brief Bio for Publications:

Ryan Drag is a New York poet, writer, musician, and educator. His poetry draws on Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and the Beat tradition, with particular interests in nature, mythology, spirituality, mortality, and music. Coyote Blood Press/Paradisiac Publishing published his first collection, MAGNET. His work has appeared in publications in the U.S., France, the U.K., and Mexico. Drag has presented at the New York City Poetry Festival and performs and composes with the psychedelic band Heavy Birds / The Lovebudz. He holds a BA in English from UMass Amherst and an MFA in Poetry from Lindenwood University.

Description of MAGNET: click to purchase MAGNET

MAGNET by Ryan Drag is a collection of lyrical verses dedicated to the exploration of one’s subconscious mind. The focus of these poems is not on traditional form but on daily meditations on life and death, metaphysics, the crow man and sirens, politics, nerve stimulation, and above all else the existence and feeling of love. This collection is in rhythm with New York City, a pulse that propels a writer to the streets to capture the sound and language of a diverse society. Drag’s voice is raw, vulnerable, and wild. In short, these poems are meant to entertain, provoke, and evoke moments of inebriation and freedom.

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Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2019