Please Do Not Feed the Ghost By Peter Ramos

These poems by Peter Ramos stage incidents of arrested breath. Diegetic scenes—a mid-century interior, a cocktail party, a clinic, an airport, and everywhere the glow of television—so embroil a psychological subject as to mirror the difficult weather that divides labor from leisure life in the caesuras of time and space. Stories of a political present rush in before receding into longer durations: an astronaut from whose solitary mission can be viewed the global contingencies between a jungle village and the failed narrative of development; or tales told by the dead come back to haunt us from the depth-effect of a daguerreotype. The plural voices of family romance and nation state, imagined otherwise or else unbearable, prompt a community for whom heartbreak and gratefulness are of an ethical piece.

— Roberto Tejada

I’ve lived with these poems for many years—they’ve never failed  me. Part Plath’s black humor, part Stevens’s bright obvious, part  Hugo’s degrees of gray, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost is an  exceptional meditation on family, country, friendship, and language— and on the inevitable loves and thefts to which these things give rise.

—Graham Foust

Peter Ramos has a gift for valuing the past, both personal and historical, without losing sight of how it can threaten the present.   The immense, rich wastage of America feeds these poems.   They take resonance, too, from mythic parental figures, which Ramos honors with a spareness and precision of language, holding their inconsolable power within the tension of poetic form.

—Allen Grossman

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Peter Ramos grew up near Baltimore, Maryland. His poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Chattahoochee Review, Fugue, Verse, MIPOesias, and other journals. In 2000, his poem “Evolution” was nominated by Meridian for a Pushcart Prize.

He holds graduate degrees from George Mason University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Ramos is an Assistant Professor of English at Buffalo State College. He and his wife, Diane, live in Buffalo, NY.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 79 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] ( Feb 2008)
· ISBN: 1-934289-55-8

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