Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book, now in softcover.
True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle’s legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.” With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.
The potent pieces resist easy interpretation, sparkling with the suggestiveness of Ruefle’s poetry. Readers will marvel at the results.
Publishers Weekly
The presiding spirit of the poems is an amiable if world-weary explorer, curious about everything yet knowing that each answer begets another question. Ruefle's writing is whimsical, in the sense that it often follows a flight of fancy to its furthest point, with little regard for anything but the process of discovery. The trajectory of any given piece might be compared to a drawing of the looping flight path of a bee. Often they have the effects of riddles or monologues delivered by oddball narrators.
Emily Berry, London Review of Books
Ruefle has excelled in writing agile, syncopated free verse, but her prose poems are even more unusual. Her investigations in the genre have yielded a sound all her own. You hear in these new poems how poetic prose can absorb and parody the regular prose of daily life: articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, legal documents, business correspondence.
Jim Schley, Seven Days
There is something quite magical in the way her pieces exist within this collection, this “book,” offering the notion of genre as something wonderfully fluid. Within compact lines and wonderful flow, she offers intimate and lyric slivers of life and thinking, meditations on ordinariness that is never truly ordinary, or spectacular simply because of that ordinariness. The variations on her prose structures hold an enormity, packing nuance into every phrase.
Rob McLennan
Untitled
The Photograph
Pixie
The Wrapped Book
Nettles
The Bark
Nope
We Need To Talk About Ice Cream
The Candy
House Hunting
A Lesson In History
My Life As A Scholar
The Cashew
My Memory of A Story by Lydia Davis
I Read Years Ago And Never Forgot
The Stagehand
The Trees
What Happens When You Die
The Cloud Beaters
The Translator
Golden Crumbs
Love Story
The Wind
The Color
The Perk
The Heart, What Is It?
I Dream Of Jung
Lucky Dragon
My Dying Friend
Dear Friends
Letter To Elizabeth Bishop
The Gables
Affordable Vacation
An American Haiku
Teeth Of Noon
The Effusive
The Novel
The Book
Chilly Observation
The Plum And The Devil