Doug Ramspeck

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.

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.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2013 Michael Waters Poetry Prize 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 or 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, these poems accentuate the slipperiness we often feel between the corporeal and incorporeal, which is the source of both our fears and longings.