In dark, lyrical verse, Black Flowers follows a speaker from childhood into adulthood, as he navigates the animistic world of crows, conjurings, and winter snows. Doug Ramspeck guides readers through the brutality and beauty found in the natural world: the moonlight, “marrow-white, severed, falling bodily / to grass, the hours as permeable as clay” and “dust lifting across the road / as though to form a human shape.” By juxtaposing euphony and clear, startling imagery, Ramspeck’s novelistic new collection molds the landscape to reflect the speaker’s memories and the challenges of growing up in a dysfunctional family. In the tradition of William Wordsworth, Black Flowers brings the flourishes of the Romantics to the grit of the present day.

Black Flowers: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Ramspeck, Doug

Poetry

LSU Press

The poems in Possum Nocturne imbue the physical world with human traits and human consciousness, the speakers imagining the landscapes of their days as alive with portentous meaning. In 1757 David Hume wrote in A Natural History of Religion: There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds . . . hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry, where trees, mountains, and streams are personified. The works in this collection are about animism and superstition, about characters who are convinced that a hoot owl whispers to us, that a black tupelo limb is an augury, that three crows in a black willow tree portend death, that a dry stream bed suggests that a spouse or relative will have a miscarriage, and that we can read our futures in the entrails of a pickerel frog or in a hognose snake skin found draped beside a river bank. Indeed, snakes in these poems often serve as mysteries and occultations. What could be more other than a creature without arms or legs, that muscles around on its own belly, that often has vertical slits as pupils, and that sticks out its tongue to understand the air? The world for the characters in these poems, then-mostly poems situated in the American Midwest and American South-is alive with its own form of consciousness and secret meanings.

Possum Nocturne

University Of Akron Press

Poetry."For those whose eyes remain open, whose hearts are not afraid to come closer, let them come and be pierced, let them come and read and turn the pages and be beholden to a poet who seems born to mesmerize, having learned from The Great Mesmerizer—the moon itself—that we are all one person, no matter who we are or when we lived."—Mary Ruefle "Often, the narrators of these poems look over their moonlit landscapes, finding in them opportunities for profound, unpredictable meditations on sex, childhood, history, poetry, and violence. Inhabited by the ghost of Walt Whitman and imbued with the pleasures of nuanced observation, this is a richly imaginative, energetic poetry collection, one I will return to with pleasure."—Kevin Prufer

Mechanical Fireflies

Barrow Street Press

In his novella Under Black Leaves, midwest author Doug Ramspeck delves into mental health, the interplay between love and loss, and the arts through the eyes of an art professor (Luke) and a Dance major (Hannah). Memories flood Professor Luke Horn as he returns to the Chicago College of the Arts campus for the new semester. After losing a charismatic student, Luke wonders if he should confess what he knows or keep it hidden. He quickly learns that you can't always hide your past. When the sister of the late student registers for his design and color course, will he be able to keep his composure and his secret? Will his guilt drive him to insanity? With a mix of romantic passion and realism, Under Black Leaves invites readers to ponder how grief and mental health affect human emotion.

Under Black Leaves

Etchings Press

Winner of the 2019 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, Distant Fires is a book about two brothers and the very different paths their lives take. One brother goes to prison and dies, but in this book he is given a voice, and his humanity is illuminated. With compelling language and great artistry, Doug Ramspeck reveals the complexity of the brothers' relationship: the love, the trauma, and the difficulty of fathoming another's heart.

Distant Fires: poems

Grayson Books

Poetry. Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, "BLACK TUPELO COUNTRY is a book of cinematic lushness razored with ache," writes poet Leslie Adrienne Miller, who selected the book for the prize. "These poems dwell in the dark, immutable seam between the natural and interior worlds." Vivian Shipley, editor of The Connecticut Review, writes, "Wicked humor is also woven into the collection in poems about commerce that depict Socrates engaging the Greeter at Wal-Mart in a Dialogue, Adam and Eve selling sub sandwiches in a mall and Odysseus buying a Cinnabon franchise when he retires."

Black Tupelo Country: poems

BkMk Press

Poetry. ORIGINAL BODIES explores the primitive mindset, the ancient brain that exists within us all. Most of us don't believe that three crows in a black willow tree portend death, that a dry steam bed suggests that a spouse or relative will have a miscarriage, that we can read our lives in the entrails of a pickerel frog or in a hognose snakeskin found draped beside a river bank. But we do wish that we might gain some small control over our destinies. Residing half in the real world and half in the dream world, the poems accentuate the slipperiness we often feel between the corporeal and incorporeal, which is the source of both our fears and longings.

Original Bodies

Southern Indiana Review Press

Fiction. Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Billy Lombardo. These twenty-nine short and short-short stories, set largely in the contemporary Midwest, echo such primal struggles as mortality, the hunt, growing up with parents who face desperation, and just-out-of-reach dreams for the future. A young boy finds a possum skull and brings it home as compensation for a family tragedy; a newly-married woman imagines that mushrooms are growing from her husband's body; and a woman who absconds with her sister's baby envisions a life for them in Florida. Ramspeck never flinches as his characters confront violence, cruelty, love, and tragedy in ways that are as surprising as they are unsentimental. "Excellent reading for those who value meditative, beautiful storytelling."--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal starred review "Ramspeck's debut collection abounds with flawed families, tense confirmations, and unlikely moments of grace...These precise and resonant stories chronicle humble lives and unspoken traumas, making for a subtle and moving reading experience."--Kirkus Reviews "Ramspeck creates a silence so thick, you flinch to hear dialogue. What isn't silent, is snow-muffled, and what snow there is, is blood-spotted."--Billy Lombardo "One is tempted, in describing Doug Ramspeck's new collection, to use the word 'unflinching'--and indeed, these fictions tackle crises that might tempt many to avert their gaze: dead, missing, or decamped fathers, tragic accidents, romantic disappointment, childhood trauma, awkward aftermaths of all kinds. The problem is that 'unflinching' gives the viewer, or the writer, special credit for not looking away. But flinching is for those who have a choice, and the characters in these spare, close-to-the-bone stories do not. What Ramspeck succeeds in here is to show us, in poignant, lyrical, but never fussy prose, what everyday fortitude looks like, what it's like to look hardship straight in its eye and keep pressing on. These are flawed, sympathetic, fully human characters, and this is a sad, dark, terrific book."--Michael Griffith

The Owl That Carries Us Away: stories

Genre Fiction

Doug Ramspeck's award-winning 9th book takes the fierce attachments and the violence of boyhood and transforms them to tenderness and a transcendent vision. Gritty poems of boyhood alternate with explorations of the "other," worlds where mother and sister orbit so differently, and later a marriage built of tenderness, not rage. Harsh honesty charges these poems--both with pure electricity and with the mission to find escape from violence, to find how to bear chaos and grief. The brothers' ordinary roughhousing is shadowed by the violence of their family life, but something pure does survive and flourish, until "we slept / at night with the breaths of the marriage around us." Poetry.

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