Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems By Bin Ramke 200 pages, (6” x 9” Paper) ISBN: 9781890650414 $16.95 Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back Within USA Free First Class or Priority Mail Shipping (To Order By Mail Click Here)

Drawing upon four decades of his poetry, and beginning with an ample selection of new work, _Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems, 1978-2008_ demonstrates Bin Ramke’s ability to bring a cornucopia of human knowledge to bear upon the individual’s most intimate experiences and most compelling encounters with the world. Whether Mr. Ramke is writing about the exigencies of family life, the complex interrelations of people with environment, or the meaning of work, of health crises, of cultural upheaval, of natural disaster -- he is able to draw upon an unprecedented range of social, scientific, literary, and philosophical sources. Such writing offers a lens of both telescopic and microscopic precision, and deepens our understanding of how intricately collaged is each instance of human existence.

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. He continues to see similar patterns arising from language and mathematics in all aspects of human consciousness and human behavior. But his childhood in rural Louisiana and Texas is also a part of the central concerns and beauty that his work tries to engage. Ramke has written nine previous poetry collections.

Praise for Theory of Mind:

from Publishers Weekly (8/17/09):
 (Starred Review)
Since winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1978, Ramke has steadily released strong and strange books of poetry. He is the rare poet who seems to become more himself with each new book, rather than more like an imitation of himself. Nonetheless, perhaps due to the difficulty of much of his work, Ramke has remained a poet's poet. This much-needed and compact selection from his nine previous books serves as a helpful introduction to this poet, whose work straddles aesthetic camps one never knew shared borders-this is language poetry with a Southern twang, or experimental writing with clear, dire subject matter. From the stark clarity of his first poems ("the only horse/ we owned died on Christmas Eve"), Ramke has journeyed toward wholly original aesthetic ground on which his own often fragmentary words share the page, even the line, with passages from obscure texts, definitions, even mathematics. Yet even Ramke's oddest poems always keep a few subjects-fatherhood, knowledge of the self and the other, love, desire-at the forefront, wishing, at times, "To kiss. To move/ mouth against mouth." And the new poems here are among Ramke's best.

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A compelling leitmotif that runs through Bin Ramke’s recent poems comes from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “Where there is no doubt there is no judgment.” Doubt, pressed to its limits and hence break-through, is at the heart of the gorgeously sounded metaphysical poems Ramke has been writing for thirty years—poems that recall Henry Vaughan in their lyric intensity, their profound understanding of scientific theorem and the natural world—wind, cloud, water, light—and especially their fidelity to the truth of the human heart. When balloons burst in these poetic spaces (see “The Twelve Symmetries”), the sound is deafening, releasing paroxysms of rage; then again “after the party,” they become “little deflated splashes of color on the floor.” But the cycle continues: the balloon may “release / the secret I had whispered too loudly blowing it up, someone listening.” Ramke’s poems are truly “prologues to what is possible.”
—Marjorie Perloff

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Once again Bin Ramke gathers the sudden hope that poetry provides in lines reaching, by turns, our necessary histories, and a tense present we cannot afford to overlook. Ramke's work is preturnaturally awake to the difficult music of this fraught century. He is a poet worth listening to and listening for.
—Susan Howe

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This wonderful book of poems sings the exuberance of number and of love; it whispers nostalgia, it breathes the mountain air as birds do. Bin Ramke’s poems are at the same time delicate, and wild; they are grandly roaming, and close to home; they encompass the love-poems-posing-as-mathematical-problems in the writings of Bhaskara, as well as the satisfying clatter of a small stone bouncing on concrete; and they remind us how grand it is to wrestle with language as Jacob wrestled with the angel.