Smoke Memories offers a profound meditation on how we carry our pasts within us—memories lingering like smoke, echoing in the mind, growing in the roadside weeds, embodied by the very landscapes in which we have lived our lives. Lucid and grave, lush and magical, Smoke Memories is a great book of poems.

—Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave

In Smoke Memories, Doug Ramspeck injects his adult self into past experiences to reevaluate them with a keen knowledge of mortality in mind. My dead are sitting with me again this morning on my back porch and saying nothing, Ramspeck explains. We must say to ourselves what the dead might wish to say. A most tender and profoundly moving new collection.

—A. Molotkov, author of Future Symptoms

A masterful meditation on family tragedies and grief, Doug Ramspeck’s Smoke Memories is at turns incantatory and stark, allegorical and personal. With the titular smoke appearing as a cigarette, housefire, beekeeping tool, chimney exhaust, crematorium signal, and more, Ramspeck weaves together repeated elements that make the book feel novelistic . . . though with a language that sings, like the dream-father in “Mud Gospel”: “And sometimes his voice was a cadence and a drum and a gospel, / and sometimes the words perched with the crows or muscled / out on their bellies with the snakes.”

—Lisa Ampleman, author of Mom in Space

About the Author

Doug Ramspeck is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. His author website can be found at dougramspeck.com.

Other Books by Doug Ramspeck

Dancing in their Dead Mother’s Dresses, stories, forthcoming

Blur, poems

Book of Years, poems

Under Black Leaves, novella

Distant Fires, poems/prose/drama

Black Flowers, poems

The Owl That Carries Us Away, stories

Original Bodies, poems

Mechanical Fireflies, poems

Possum Nocturne, poems

Where We Come From, poems

Black Tupelo Country, poems

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