Doug Ramspeck, Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses (Pre-Order)

There’s poetry and magic in Doug Ramspeck’s Dancing in Their Dead Mother’s Dresses. Featuring gray Midwestern landscapes, night skies filled with stars like bones, and “clouds carrying dusk in their underbellies,” Ramspeck’s dazzling collection imbues every sensory moment with a near-religious intensity. In these grim yet optimistic stories, the characters crackle with internal life even as they are haunted by death. I was entranced and awed by their furious light, which refuses to be dimmed.
—Darrin Doyle, author of Let Gravity Seize the Dead 

Doug Ramspeck is the author of ten collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and a novella. Individual stories have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Iowa Review, and The Georgia Review. His short story “Balloon” was listed as a Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories (2019). He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, twice for poetry and once for fiction. His previous story collection, The Owl That Carries Us Away (University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2018), received a starred review in Library Journal. Barbara Hoffert praised the book’s “beautiful storytelling.” Ramspeck’s author website can be found at dougramspeck.com. He and his wife live on a mountain in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with bears as neighbors.