Ugler Lee (Paperback or Softback)

Aneurism, suicide, heart attack, old age—one way or another, Death will find you. It’s just a matter of when. These remarkable poems, steeped in family lore, explore the complexity of living and dying in our modern age. Rammelkamp’s poems, brave, wise, and often devastatingly funny, take the reader on a journey, at once personal and universal, into the depths of family, in all its messy beauty, exposing the humanity that connects us all.

—Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of The Dead Kid Poems, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

History has not just been kind to Charles Rammelkamp; it has inspired some of his strongest poetry. In Ugler Lee, history turns personal as Rammelkamp shifts his gaze onto his own family. Far from an exercise in navel-gazing, Ugler Lee is Rammelkamp’s melancholic and witty meditation on time, loss, and closure. It is a worthy addition to an already enviable oeuvre.

—Nitin Jagdish, co-curator of Lit & Art, Baltimore’s longest-running reading series

Ugler Lee, Charles Rammelkamp’s engaging new book of poems, will reverberate through the bones of every reader. Rich with details both familiar and surprising, a droll sense of humor and subtle music, these poems chronicle the inevitable decline of husbands, wives, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, pets, as well as oneself. Together, Rammelkamp’s eminently readable poems create a portrait of Ugler Lee that is intimate, utterly human yet mysterious. I know I will return to these poems again and again to re-experience the grace of Rammelkamp’s voice and vision.

—Alison Morse, author of The Price of Our Clothes and If You Wave a Chicken Over Your Head