Books by Mary Ruefle and Complete Book Reviews

Mary Ruefle, Author . Carnegie-Mellon Univ. $24.95 (88p) ISBN 978-0-88748-367-7
The fast-moving, jittery poems in this fifth volume from the well-respected Ruefle (The Adamant) try hard to portray the world as her speaker really feels it: "I want," she exclaims, "to have/ an ecstatic relationship with life." In...
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Mary Ruefle, Author . Carnegie Mellon $14.95 (80p) ISBN 978-0-88748-467-4
The title of Ruefle's 10th collection of poetry is evocative of a divine pronouncement upon creation, yet the statement's past tense suggests an ominous future awaits. It is this beginning and end, in all its myriad tellings, that Ruefle...
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Mary Ruefle, Wave (Consortium, dist.), $24 (178p) ISBN 978-1-933517-45-2
This first retrospective collection from Ruefle, which selects from her nine previous books of poetry, the earliest of which first appeared in 1982, shows her to be a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor. This...
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Mary Ruefle, Author Carnegie-Mellon University Press $24.95 (88p) ISBN 978-0-88748-315-8
""I only wanted to say that god and art/ are dumpsters, they keep expanding to take this garbage in."" The poet of the many short, elegantly worked poems of this fifth collection slips behind screens of language, dazzling the reader but leaving the...
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Mary Ruefle, Author . Carnegie-Mellon Univ. $13.95 (91p) ISBN 978-0-88748-407-0
The prolific Ruefle has become known for her for short, loaded poems whose reason-defying stories and near-dreamlike juxtapositions take readers close to the actual processing of experience; this eighth book keeps the whimsy but (as the title...
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Mary Ruefle, Author Wave Books $11.95 (95p) ISBN 978-1-933517-29-2
These 31 \x93stories\x94 from poet Ruefle (Indeed I Was Pleased with the World) are more like brief squibs, close observations and meditations. \x93Snow,\x94 for example, expresses the wondrous and sexual sense of benediction the narrator feels when
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Mary Ruefle. Wave (Consortium, dist.), $25 (128p) ISBN 978-1-940696-38-6
In this collection of short essays and prose poems, Ruefle (Trances of the Blast) rambles through the quotidian and the morbid, displaying quirkiness as well as the sublime. The writing recalls fables , in that contained narratives and simple...
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Mary Ruefle. Wave, $25 (104p) ISBN 978-1-940696-85-0
Ruefle (My Private Party) delivers a giddy, incisive ode to failure, fragility, and unknowing in her 12th book. “It may be our heads/ are filled with feathers/ from the stuff/ we don’t know,” she hazards, tiptoeing through one after another...
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Mary Ruefle, Author . Wave Books $12 (42p) ISBN 978-1-933517-03-2
Alongside her justly known poems, Ruefle (Tristimania , 2003) also crafts what she calls "erasures," found texts from which she has crossed out almost all the words, leaving only a tiny poem's worth per page; the latter make up this book.
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Mary Ruefle. Wave (Consortium, dist.), $25 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-933517-57-5
Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny, this collection of unconventional prose about poetry might secure an audience far larger than the one that already exists for Ruefle’s own poems. Known for her post-Surrealist lyric and for...
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Mary Ruefle. Wave, $25 (96p) ISBN 978-1-950268-84-9
The generic title of this beguiling compendium of prose from poet Ruefle (Dunce) belies the richness and variety within. The fragmentary entries touch on an eclectic array of topics and range in length from a few lines to several pages, but they all
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