Doug Ramspeck (photo by Michael Ayers)

Where We Come From

Doug Ramspeck

The old women are gossiping about the river.
They are imagining their bodies carried
by the current beneath the oxbow bridge,
dragged into the bottomlands.
It is dead summer now. The air is thick
and unwieldy as loam. Old men
are dragging catfish from the water
and slicing off their heads. The cypresses
are drooping like the veil of life.
The old women are thinking of the body’s
loneliness. Of the spiny softshell buried
in the mud. The river whispers and pulses
beneath the bridge where a young cottonmouth
is swimming with its sulfur-yellow tail.
There are voices in the river.
They make a mournful sound
that is beautiful at dusk. While the blood-red
sky steeps the swamp in glow.

ISBN 1-59661-101-4
35 pages/$9

The poems in Where We Come From are darkly lyrical, with consistently striking and incantatory imagery. These lyrics would be unbearably frightening, with their repetitively insistent view of the natural world as threatening and vindictive, were it not for the poet’s own steady control, an artful order imposed on the madness.
—Joe Benevento,
Poetry Editor, Green Hills Literary Lantern

Where We Come From splays open the muck of memory and lays it on the page. Among the entrails we find a simple and sometimes harsh way of life, longing and regret and an ever-present river that feeds, nurtures and coils through the lives of the people it touches. Ramspeck’s words paint a picture of these people, this time and place with a tincture of bayou magic that leaves the reader wanting more.
—M. Scott Douglass,
Publisher/Editor, Main Street Rag

Doug Ramspeck’s new, often startling collection, Where We Come From, discovers a mythic old country, “lovely” and “dark,” an aboriginal home place. Here flesh and spirit meld—must coexist—often in dreams grounded in rich, natural imagery as in “First Fire”: “…bodies dissolved and turned/to leaf meal [and] bones stood up as tree limbs/in the night.”
—Philip Miller,
Editor, The Same