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 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"

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2008

Reviews

[amyjo]

Wonderful collection of poems, smart, funny, and poignant. Must read.

[E I]

I love poetry whose lines draw me in. Peter Ramos is the type of poet I admire for being able to craft seemingly simple phrases and standing them on their head. His punches are selective but accurate, like a boxing tactician, knowing that to go the distance is about art as much as craft. The poetry is poignant, heartfelt, and honest. That's my kind of poetry and Ramos delivers.