Smoke Memories
Title: Smoke MemoriesPublished by: Redhawk Publications
Release Date: February 18, 2025
Genre: Poetry
ISBN13: 978-1-959346-85-2
Buy the Book: Redhawk Publications, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Overview
These poems about childhood memories explore the fissures and fault lines arising from a mother’s complicated struggle with mental illness, memories that evolve and devolve over decades.
Praise
"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
"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
"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
Sample Poem
Tomato Divination
Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence
at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear
as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria
at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellow jackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me
once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.
And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream—knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window—her voice like concentric
circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.