Doug Ramspeck is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Original Bodies (Southern Indiana review Press, 2014), and Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press, 2011). His first book, Black Tupelo County (BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2008), received the John Cardi Prize. He Teaches at The Ohio State University at Lima.

Other poems by Doug Ramspeck in Verse Daily:
August 9, 2012:   "Starving Horse" "It is morning and no worse for it...."
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:
Two poems
"Gravity"
"Diaspora"
"Alluvial Prophecy"
Two poems
"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 Original Bodies:

"A crow's 'single black feather' assumes the resonance of 'prophecy and prayer' as Doug Ramspeck acknowledges the elemental-rain and mud-as world enough in which to perform 'this privilege of naming,' what he calls 'a languaging.' Such simplicity belies the depths of perception that make these poems moving and memorable. If there is an old-fashioned quality to this work, it is that found in the work of James Wright and Mary Oliver, two other Ohio poets who touch us with their wise and eloquent longings."
—Michael Waters

"This breathtaking collection is situated within a 'rhetoric of earth'-communing with the language of crows, the speech of rivers and thunder, of fields and rain and mud. Here, language is not so much a language but a feeling, and naming not so much a representation as it is a transformation of the ephemeral shape of longing into song. Here, like 'birds singing out of their bodies,' these poems sing their way out of their own bodies into something unnamable, ecstatic, and free."
—Lee Ann Roripaugh