Doug Ramspeck is the author of four poetry collections. His first book, Black Tupelo Country, received the John Ciardi Prize. He teaches at The Ohio State University at Lima.

Other poems by Doug Ramspeck in Verse Daily:
March 4, 2011:   "Feral Evening" "Not the bats diving..."
September 30, 2010:   "Gorgeous Light" "We lived by a bay..."
July 23, 2009:   "Bottomlands Tongue" "And so the burning of this sun beside the pickerelweeds..."
July 16, 2009:   "Mermaid in my Fish Bowl" "I would say she was no larger..."
January 17, 2009:   "Possum Nocturne" "The boy found a possum skull..."
May 17, 2008:   "Late Husband" "In her dreams, then, she imagined him as feverish...."

Books by Doug Ramspeck:

Other poems on the web by Doug Ramspeck:
"Life in the Woods"
"One True Poem"
"After"
"Voodoo Sonnets"
"Deposition"
"Memoir"
Two poems
Six poems
"Tupelos"
"Love Theory"
Three poems
Four poems
"Smoke and Ash"
"Waterborne"
Two poems
"Ritual Cloud Line"

About Mechanical Fireflies:

"Mechanical Fireflies is the perfect collision of James Wright's anti-pastorals with Wallace Stevens's meditations on the real."
—Kathy Fagan

"For those whose eyes remain open, whose hearts are not afraid to come closer, let them come and be pierced, let them come and read and turn the pages and be beholden to a poet who seems born to mes- merize, having learned from The Great Mesmerizer — the moon itself — that we are all one person, no matter who we are or when we lived."
—Mary Ruefle

"Often, the narrators of these poems look over their moonlit landscapes, finding in them opportunities for profound, unpredictable meditations on sex, childhood, history, poetry, and violence. Inhabited by the ghost of Walt Whitman and imbued with the pleasures of nuanced observation, this is a richly imagina- tive, energetic poetry collection, one I will return to with pleasure."
—Kevin Prufer