Black Flowers: Poems

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.

Doug Ramspeck is associate professor of English at The Ohio State University at Lima and the author of six collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. His prize-winning work has been published in a range of journals, including The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, storySouth, and The American Literary Review.