"As he guides you, slowly, carefully, through this gothic castle of a debut, full of shadowplay and mirrorshimmer, crawling with all manner of beasts, birds, angels and demons, and echoing with so many eerie, familiar, whispering voices, Jerome Ramcharitar opens a door to a realm of aesthetics seldom visited in twenty-first century poetry. The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors takes you to a place where the urban and the fantastical, the elemental and the savant, all mesh in a language plain and direct and yet highly symbolically charged. It's Gwendolyn MacEwen meeting you at the grocery store. It's you running into an eighth-century bard at a rave. It's a hugely impressive book written by a highly esteemed member of the Montreal writing community. To be read out loud and, chiefly, at night."

—James Dunnigan, author of I Spurinna, and Windchime Concerto

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"The poems in Jerome Ramcharitar's The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors hinge on how we listen, interpret, and pass through language. By turns wry, sly, and elegant, Ramcharitar treats the riddle not as a puzzle to be solved but as a mode of thinking-one that activates mystery and multiplicity while sidestepping traps of mundane logic. With precision, lyrical control, and layered sonic texture, these poems transform philosophical inquiry into mulch, making cognition material: a living thing that prowls the page as animal, appetite, movement, blood, and breath."

—Domenica Martinello, author of Good Want

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"When you cross the threshold to enter The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors, "expect the impossible."  Jerome Ramcharitar’s pages of  poetry are indeed "rectangular art" to use one of his own metaphors. Once in, be prepared for strikingly vivid imagery that crashes and splashes on the shores of your mind impelling it to ponder the frailty of life and the mystery of death: "I wear a dress of ash" is a haunting line in the poem , "A dress of Ash" for Mitsuno Ochi.

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Throughout, we find riddles, which add to the overall sense of mystery and, reminiscent of koans, are islands of truths to be unearthed: "However deep your hands are in the sand/ you can pull them up to find something" says one poem.

Ramcharitar’s well-crafted poems delve not only into human complexities but also imagine and speak from the perspectives of ravens, crows, spiders and other creatures—some even undergo shape-shifting as found in fantasy novels.

 

Behind the third door of The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors we find the narrator rebelling against man’s relation to and reliance on  machine/technology “…the idea that we are victims/ by choice and we've earned the disaster."

Countless remarkable lines distinguish this collection as the work of an enduring poet for whom reflection and thought are "Like the skin of a flame/that dances the shape of its fuel."

—Maria Caltabiano Montuori, author of Drawing Daybreak

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