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    • Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.




      (Photo credit: Libby Lewis Photography)

    • Reviews

      Ruefle’s lectures pleasantly bend your mind by sending you tripping along a path of philosophy, history, word play, sly jokes, blunt truths and beautifully crafted lies.
      —Mike Andrelczyk, Lancaster Online

      Straightforward in form, comic and companionable in tone, blessed with the Martian gift of seeing the strange in the ordinary and vice-versa...
      —Joel Brouwer, Poetry

      Ruefle’s speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us.
      —Adrien Blevins, Ploughshares

      For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience.
      —Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America

      [She is] a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor.
      Publishers Weekly

      Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness.
      —Tony Hoagland, On the Seawall

      Ruefle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas — surreal and lyrical and deeply moving at the same time.
      — Michael Klein, Los Angeles Review of Books

      They record small moments with sweeping scope, moments in which the speed of thought seems to outpace real time.
      –– Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

      Each poem radiates with the intensity of her attention and reveals the mysteriousness deep within daily life.
      –– Lisa Grgas, The Adroit Journal

      Ruefle makes the impossible connect, and her connections seem comforting, and all-encompassing.
      –– Rob Mclennan

      Her observant, humorous, tender, heartbreaking, atmospheric writing is the kind of writing to have in your backpack (just in case) at all times.
      –– Ben Niespodziany, neonpajamas


Reviews of books by Mary Ruefle

My Private Property

Trances of the Blast

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Selected Poems

The Most of It

A Little White Shadow

 

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