Aerial - Softcover

BIN RAMKE, former editor of a book series for the University of Georgia Press, current editor of the Denver Quarterly and holder of the Phipps Chair in English at the University of Denver, studied mathematics in college before turning to poetry. Prior to that he spent a summer at age sixteen studying with topologist (and famously racist teacher) R.L. Moore at the University of Texas. He continues to see similar patterns arising from language and mathematics in all aspects of human consciousness and human behavior. His childhood in rural Louisiana and east Texas is also a part of the central concerns and beauty that his work tries to engage. But along with the beauty he experienced a particularly virulent ugliness, the racial hatred that was part of the American experience of the 1960s. The American South was an explicit and obvious force and subject in his first several books of poems but Ramke was never an easy fit into the “southern writing” category—probably for lack of adequate narrative. And yet in the last several books he has written extensively out of, or around, the devastations of hurricane and flood, especially Katrina and Rita, on the region.