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The Book
Following the acclaimed Dunce , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book . 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.
- GenresPoetryEssaysNonfiction
96 pages, Hardcover
Published September 5, 2023
19 people are currently reading
435 people want to read
About the author
Mary Ruefle
46 books435 followersMary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.
Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...
Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 63 reviews
June 22, 2023
I find it hard to talk about Mary Ruefle’s work partly because I like it so much and partly because she has such a unique voice and sensibility that she really needs to be experienced firsthand to be fully appreciated. Although she’s mostly known for her poetry, this collection shows Ruefle continuing to defy conventional genre boundaries and these pieces tip a little more towards prose. In keeping with Ruefle’s self-confessed fascination with chronicling the everyday and life as she lives it, the entries here shift from a focus on the seemingly inconsequential like the details of her half-remembered dream to a series of striking meditations on friendship, aging, loss and mortality. Explorations of the processes of writing and reading surface and resurface: reflections on the complexity of encounters between reader and book, as well as thoughts about authors like Lydia Davis and Elizabeth Bishop. As always Ruefle displays a remarkable agility when it comes to composition and wordplay, and she’s adept at conjuring marvellously-unexpected juxtapositions of ideas or eccentric, but fertile, associations. Here she ranges from devastatingly intimate and confiding to coolly analytical to wryly humorous – I particularly relished her portrait of a hapless haikuist in search of the perfect haiku.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Wave Books for an ARC
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Wave Books for an ARC
November 30, 2023
The last time I saw my friend was the night of a full moon when he desired us to view it from the end of a pier so dangerously dilapidated it had been cordoned off by a chain and an ordinance. He drove to the chain, got out of the car, unhitched the chain, and drove us to the end of the pier where we sat in silence as the moon rose over the ocean. Finally he turned to me and said they can't keep the moon out.
No they can't; nor the heart. It's here, in this slip of a book, thirty-nine prose pieces, most of them a half-page to a page and a half. Prose pieces that read like poems, the author being an established poet. They read as true, and I suppose they are. Not memoir, just those selective moments in a life that touched the heart. Make it a song, then, but minimalist, with spare accompaniment. Yet each word matters. Here:
The author, tired of writing out the return address on her envelopes, decides to have an inkstamp made. Waiting in line at the store it dawns on her that her address would be the usual three lines. Three lines, she thinks: a haiku. The one that comes to her is by Ikkyū, a fifteenth-century Zen monk:
The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pinetrees
blowing in the painting?
That's lovely. But when she picks up the finished stamp, she wonders if she got it wrong. She asks some poet friends who offer this instead:
The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pinetrees
there in the painting?
The author decides she prefers the former. (Her poet friends, and I, prefer the latter.) But there is no right or wrong answer. It's whether you think this nonsense, or a delight. You will know which.
There is another piece where she's reading a novel by a fire when it occurs to her that someone, anonymous to her, somewhere in the world, is reading the same sentence at that moment. Yet she prefers her reading to be a solitary act. She slows down, takes a walk, un-synchronizes. And then:
I kept reading, I was calm, I forgot about my irrational fears of a moment ago, and some hundred pages on, when they were entirely forgotten, the author began writing about the fear of the doppelgänger, the twin, the mirror, the echo, the identical other, and I was paralyzed again, not with the fear of the other reader, who was by now pages and pages ahead of me, but with the new fear that the author inhabited me, and had my thoughts, and that my experience was no longer my own, and never had been.
Again, you will know which.
No they can't; nor the heart. It's here, in this slip of a book, thirty-nine prose pieces, most of them a half-page to a page and a half. Prose pieces that read like poems, the author being an established poet. They read as true, and I suppose they are. Not memoir, just those selective moments in a life that touched the heart. Make it a song, then, but minimalist, with spare accompaniment. Yet each word matters. Here:
The author, tired of writing out the return address on her envelopes, decides to have an inkstamp made. Waiting in line at the store it dawns on her that her address would be the usual three lines. Three lines, she thinks: a haiku. The one that comes to her is by Ikkyū, a fifteenth-century Zen monk:
The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pinetrees
blowing in the painting?
That's lovely. But when she picks up the finished stamp, she wonders if she got it wrong. She asks some poet friends who offer this instead:
The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pinetrees
there in the painting?
The author decides she prefers the former. (Her poet friends, and I, prefer the latter.) But there is no right or wrong answer. It's whether you think this nonsense, or a delight. You will know which.
There is another piece where she's reading a novel by a fire when it occurs to her that someone, anonymous to her, somewhere in the world, is reading the same sentence at that moment. Yet she prefers her reading to be a solitary act. She slows down, takes a walk, un-synchronizes. And then:
I kept reading, I was calm, I forgot about my irrational fears of a moment ago, and some hundred pages on, when they were entirely forgotten, the author began writing about the fear of the doppelgänger, the twin, the mirror, the echo, the identical other, and I was paralyzed again, not with the fear of the other reader, who was by now pages and pages ahead of me, but with the new fear that the author inhabited me, and had my thoughts, and that my experience was no longer my own, and never had been.
Again, you will know which.
September 17, 2023
Ah. Really like the sweet essay "Dear Friends"; here is a part:
“When we were teenagers, we shared the belief that we were human beings on a spiritual journey, but by the time we were fifty we both pretty much knew we were spiritual beings on a human journey, and we expressed this belief by exchanging Christmas cards every December.”
and here's the entirely of another piece of this fine book The Book.
The Bark
I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked, the echo of the bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
“When we were teenagers, we shared the belief that we were human beings on a spiritual journey, but by the time we were fifty we both pretty much knew we were spiritual beings on a human journey, and we expressed this belief by exchanging Christmas cards every December.”
and here's the entirely of another piece of this fine book The Book.
The Bark
I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked, the echo of the bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
June 13, 2025
The Book, is a subtle humorous poetry book filled with prose poems and letters by the well known poet Mary Ruefle. She is also the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey, a book of her collected lectures with many wise gleanings on poetry writing.
Included in this book are letters on a variety of her friends through time, and a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, from an art show centered on Elizabeth Bishop. They invited her to sit and write on a typewriter for four hours, as Elizabeth used to write. In the notes she explains the letter to Elizabeth cuts off in the middle of a sentence when the four hours ended because she was ready to go home.
There are many gems to be found here including stories that may or may not be true, given this is poetry. I wonder about her poem "Perk," one of my favorites, Did she really threw a pizza making party with a clown for her husband? The only reason the owner of the pizza parlor agreed was because he knew her work, I had to laugh out loud when this renowned poet wrote: "I was completely taken aback, as far as I knew I wasn't known to anyone, except maybe four people in another state." After all, I waited on line to see her when she came to Seattle to give one of her talks.
Here is one of her short, subtle poems, of the many I enjoyed.
The Bark
I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water's edge and barked,
the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again
he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the
other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
Included in this book are letters on a variety of her friends through time, and a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, from an art show centered on Elizabeth Bishop. They invited her to sit and write on a typewriter for four hours, as Elizabeth used to write. In the notes she explains the letter to Elizabeth cuts off in the middle of a sentence when the four hours ended because she was ready to go home.
There are many gems to be found here including stories that may or may not be true, given this is poetry. I wonder about her poem "Perk," one of my favorites, Did she really threw a pizza making party with a clown for her husband? The only reason the owner of the pizza parlor agreed was because he knew her work, I had to laugh out loud when this renowned poet wrote: "I was completely taken aback, as far as I knew I wasn't known to anyone, except maybe four people in another state." After all, I waited on line to see her when she came to Seattle to give one of her talks.
Here is one of her short, subtle poems, of the many I enjoyed.
The Bark
I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water's edge and barked,
the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again
he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the
other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
April 18, 2024
Are these prose poems? Mini essays? A little of each? They often pose as memoir, but certainly aren’t all true. Ruefle has a sharp eye for the everyday, then veers into almost surreal happenings and images. I loved it. Honestly though it sounds trite, what will stay with me most is the line about how she once thought of herself as “a human being on a spiritual journey” but now sees herself as “a spiritual being on a human journey.” It felt paradigm-shifting for me in a way I haven’t figured out yet.
In “Letter to Elizabeth Bishop” Ruefle writes about a letter in which Bishop ordered a Black Watch plaid jacket. Black Watch, she says, is no longer in fashion:
“The Age of Black Watch Plaid has passed, no one wears it anymore, you would not be caught dead in it, even if you were alive. It is as charming as ever, that plaid, but its existence harks back to the time before women alive today existed. Why does it still exist, you may ask, and it exists precisely because it is useless, like all beautiful things Elizabeth, your poems and jacket among them, they persist in their secret obscurity, they go on and on wearing the shoes of a ghost who”
(That’s the end of the piece.) This passage is as good an exemplar as any of The Book’s approach to memory, aging, and mortality, the fact that the world will go on after we are gone, but that perhaps, without us in it to love certain things and people, it will be different.
In “Letter to Elizabeth Bishop” Ruefle writes about a letter in which Bishop ordered a Black Watch plaid jacket. Black Watch, she says, is no longer in fashion:
“The Age of Black Watch Plaid has passed, no one wears it anymore, you would not be caught dead in it, even if you were alive. It is as charming as ever, that plaid, but its existence harks back to the time before women alive today existed. Why does it still exist, you may ask, and it exists precisely because it is useless, like all beautiful things Elizabeth, your poems and jacket among them, they persist in their secret obscurity, they go on and on wearing the shoes of a ghost who”
(That’s the end of the piece.) This passage is as good an exemplar as any of The Book’s approach to memory, aging, and mortality, the fact that the world will go on after we are gone, but that perhaps, without us in it to love certain things and people, it will be different.
January 11, 2025
One of my first reads of 2025. Oh Mary Ruefle. This book, The Book, is exactly like the best of Ruefle. Stream of consciousness, the best of prose poetry, the kind that feels like someone whose loved hugely and has the exact kind of curiosity that is known to kill cats, and a certain “whose to say but I’m writing it anyways” kind of poems. The Book is a collection of short prose poems - some, one paragraph, most are a page, the longest a list of the different friends she has/has had (“I had a friend who, at a very sad time in my life, was more or less my only friend, and she was sad too, and she was a dog”). And, “I have a friend who believed that birds have souls but humans do not.” And and these are the poems, this is The Book. I very much recommend.
February 7, 2024
Mary Ruefle always has it! Type o book I don't want to lend out because I want to be able to return to many of these poems at any moment
December 11, 2024
The eponymous piece ("the book") was about a book left on a shelf, forgotten, until one day the writer picked it up, and after all its time unread, discovered that it seemed to have been written especially for her. Worry not, unread books, it says, because one day you will find someone who has been waiting for you.
I found this book in the library, took it with me on a whim, and it soothed me in ways I can't explain during a hard week. What magic it is that this book is The Book. How did The Book know?
I found this book in the library, took it with me on a whim, and it soothed me in ways I can't explain during a hard week. What magic it is that this book is The Book. How did The Book know?
November 25, 2023
I think of [Mary Ruefle|282933]'s brain scan and can't believe it's anything like mine or anyone I know. Unique and thought provoking vignettes about every imaginable subject from cashews to Jung to haikus to Dear Friends: "Then one day I picked up a magazine and read an interview with the COO (chief operating officer) of Facebook, perhaps she still is, I don't know, but she was asked how many friends she had and she said, "Over three thousand. I don't know all of them but I have met them in one shape or form." I would rather be antiquated--I would rather die--than make a statement like that. I know my friends..."and she goes on with a precise, knowing descriptions of her various friends such as: "I had a friend who loved apple trees and apple blossoms and apple orchards, he loved swimming in ponds and lake, and making current jam and jam from mulberries and playing the harmonica, but when he read, he loved books, he read heavy German tomes."
Or "I have a friend who believes that birds have souls but humans do not."
As Poetry Foundation's Janina Ambikapathy wrote "If this book is about recollection, and a meditation on the inevitable passing of all things, it is also about errors, cracks in our recall that switch the familiar world for one that is slightly strange. [Mary Ruefle|282933] writes about the fluctuating intensity of friendships, missed connections, and affections sent out into the world that bounce right back: “She kept calling, I didn’t pick up, and finally she stopped. I think she understood I was somehow not the same.” "The plum sat in the sun for three hours, its skin split apart and its syrup began to ooze out. When I bit into it, I thought of William Carlos Williams..."
"I am a tall person who is small and mean inside. For instance, I wake Christmas morning and begin to pack away all of my Christmas decorations."
Wave Books is a publisher to treasure as is this volume.
Or "I have a friend who believes that birds have souls but humans do not."
As Poetry Foundation's Janina Ambikapathy wrote "If this book is about recollection, and a meditation on the inevitable passing of all things, it is also about errors, cracks in our recall that switch the familiar world for one that is slightly strange. [Mary Ruefle|282933] writes about the fluctuating intensity of friendships, missed connections, and affections sent out into the world that bounce right back: “She kept calling, I didn’t pick up, and finally she stopped. I think she understood I was somehow not the same.” "The plum sat in the sun for three hours, its skin split apart and its syrup began to ooze out. When I bit into it, I thought of William Carlos Williams..."
"I am a tall person who is small and mean inside. For instance, I wake Christmas morning and begin to pack away all of my Christmas decorations."
Wave Books is a publisher to treasure as is this volume.
February 22, 2025
“look at this, a helicopter! what would kafka say?”
(on a much younger friend) “I sometimes feel like a wild duck flying over her head, knowing all the time we have spent together will one day be no more than an occasional vivid memory for her… and then I realize that this is true of all friendships— they are wild ducks flying overhead—“
“he was beginning to think of one long haiku, rising and subsiding like waves in the ocean, coming forward and dropping a seashell, which, whenever the haikuist picked it up, he put to his ear and heard again the long road rolling away beneath him when as a child he slept on the floor of his parent’s car. Then the sea took the shell back.”
(on a much younger friend) “I sometimes feel like a wild duck flying over her head, knowing all the time we have spent together will one day be no more than an occasional vivid memory for her… and then I realize that this is true of all friendships— they are wild ducks flying overhead—“
“he was beginning to think of one long haiku, rising and subsiding like waves in the ocean, coming forward and dropping a seashell, which, whenever the haikuist picked it up, he put to his ear and heard again the long road rolling away beneath him when as a child he slept on the floor of his parent’s car. Then the sea took the shell back.”
May 3, 2024
Inhaled it. I always do this with Ruefle’s prose pieces- these collections (The Most of It, My Private Property and now this) are among my favorite books by own of my most favorite writers. The long, central essay on friends the writer has had over the course of her life was a standout for me- one that I know I’ll return to again and again. No one sounds like her!
October 19, 2023
I forced myself to take my time, which was difficult. I could have gobbled these pieces up in a day.
February 8, 2024
Such lovely, charming micro-essays. I could read her ceaselessly and never grow tired of her style. The essay on friends was especially outstanding.
February 19, 2024
many of these did not speak to me but worth reading for a few standouts —
“the heart, what is it?”: beautiful discussion of words & i am now more interested in haikus
“dear friends”: exploration of the complexity and inexplicable beauty, sometimes heartbreaking nature of individual friendships
“the heart, what is it?”: beautiful discussion of words & i am now more interested in haikus
“dear friends”: exploration of the complexity and inexplicable beauty, sometimes heartbreaking nature of individual friendships
April 4, 2025
HHHGHHNNNNGGHH OH MY GODDDDDD
April 4, 2025
Although the beginning of the book was confusing, I find it precious how the book is a part of who Mary is. It is her thoughts, grief, happiness, life that I got to get a peak in. Grief was a common sting in this book but Mary writes about it as a natural part of life- to live and to lost. I love her creativity with writing and find that reading it felt like looking into my future.
February 17, 2024
My only complaint is that it is too short.
February 25, 2025
Life written in the sand
Read
June 27, 2025Good read. Mary Ruefle master of endings.
June 5, 2024
This isn't the first January I've started my reading with a Mary Ruefle book (if not her most recent The Book), and it's not a bad tradition, curled up in my chair on quiet snowy mornings with her conversational reflections. (Synonyms for conversational: chatty, gossipy, long-winded, loquacious, verbose, garrulous—none of which are right.) In The Book, she returns to prose poems (hooray!). Her poems feel like she's taken you aside at a party to tell you an anecdote, and you smile and respond, "You're holding a photograph taken over a hundred years ago? You have a memory of your first haircut? Your friend is studying Buddhism and gave you a gift? Sure, Mary, I'll follow you." And then she gives you the details and takes a few detours and you're nodding and smiling like, "Nice, Mary, that's funny/sweet/a bummer." And then she gives you the last line and your jaw drops because you realize oh this was planned from the beginning and damn, everything is different now.
That's "Pixie" for you.
Until next January, Mary.
That's "Pixie" for you.
Until next January, Mary.
October 2, 2023
Hi Mom!!
This was such a joy to read. I couldn’t put it down. What a cool lady, she transforms mundanity into magic, into tender, powerful, moving gems that I want to stare at forever.
This is my favorite kind of book - vignettes, balanced on the line of poetry and memoir, like I’m sitting at a table with the writer and instead of conversing or lecturing, she’s showing me a series of her very favorite (unrelated) photographs.
And to think I helped her check out books and movies once upon a time!
I love you mama, I miss you tons & tons, to absolute bits & pieces. Always always always.
Pie
This was such a joy to read. I couldn’t put it down. What a cool lady, she transforms mundanity into magic, into tender, powerful, moving gems that I want to stare at forever.
This is my favorite kind of book - vignettes, balanced on the line of poetry and memoir, like I’m sitting at a table with the writer and instead of conversing or lecturing, she’s showing me a series of her very favorite (unrelated) photographs.
And to think I helped her check out books and movies once upon a time!
I love you mama, I miss you tons & tons, to absolute bits & pieces. Always always always.
Pie
January 24, 2024
2 stars, unfortunately. Poetry either clicks with me or it doesn't, and this didn't.
A friend in bookclub noted that the emotions explored in this collection are small, quiet, and subtle-- which may be the issue. I guess I need big emotions in my poetry?
I also didn't quite vibe with the prose itself. It wasn't particularly beautiful or profound... It just felt like ramblings written down. Not my thing.
The poems that stood out to me were nettles, affordable vacation, American haiku, and the novel. But even with these, I'm not likely to remember them over time.
A friend in bookclub noted that the emotions explored in this collection are small, quiet, and subtle-- which may be the issue. I guess I need big emotions in my poetry?
I also didn't quite vibe with the prose itself. It wasn't particularly beautiful or profound... It just felt like ramblings written down. Not my thing.
The poems that stood out to me were nettles, affordable vacation, American haiku, and the novel. But even with these, I'm not likely to remember them over time.
October 18, 2023
“The heart, what is it,
is it the sound of the pinetrees
blowing in the painting?”
— Mary Ruefle misremembering a haiku by Ikkyu
is it the sound of the pinetrees
blowing in the painting?”
— Mary Ruefle misremembering a haiku by Ikkyu
August 16, 2023
First, the book is a fine book. I ordered it weeks ago. When I picked it up at the bookstore today it was still sealed in plastic. Wave Books are a pleasure to hold, touch and read. The paper, the print. But that’s just the book.
After dinner I started reading and didn’t stop until I’d finished. At first I thought it was intermittently clever, which I appreciate and even expect from Mary Ruefle, then somewhere along the way, maybe a third of the way through, I was swept away, anchored page by page, chuckling, and sometimes deeply moved. No doubt it’s a terrible thing when you can read a piece that begins “It’s been a great year. I turned seventy and my brother shot himself.” and think, yep. The core of the book is a series of small tales about “Dear Friends.” Exquisite. Many good moments, solid, private, exact. There’s even a clever joke almost hidden at the end.
A book for readers, those of us who live half-inside our books; a book for readers who love poetry, humor, women, imagination. I’ll steal a line she borrowed from Jack Gilbert: How paltry is the Devil’s power to destroy compared to what can momentarily be. Yep.
After dinner I started reading and didn’t stop until I’d finished. At first I thought it was intermittently clever, which I appreciate and even expect from Mary Ruefle, then somewhere along the way, maybe a third of the way through, I was swept away, anchored page by page, chuckling, and sometimes deeply moved. No doubt it’s a terrible thing when you can read a piece that begins “It’s been a great year. I turned seventy and my brother shot himself.” and think, yep. The core of the book is a series of small tales about “Dear Friends.” Exquisite. Many good moments, solid, private, exact. There’s even a clever joke almost hidden at the end.
A book for readers, those of us who live half-inside our books; a book for readers who love poetry, humor, women, imagination. I’ll steal a line she borrowed from Jack Gilbert: How paltry is the Devil’s power to destroy compared to what can momentarily be. Yep.
May 22, 2023
“If everyone were a storyteller, the infrastructure of the village would collapse. With more than one teller — with so many — contention and conflict would ensue. The one true storyteller — who can say which one? — would be compelled to retire to a cave and sit silent for ten years, eating nothing but nettles and drinking the tea that can be made from them. When he (she? they?) came out, the village would be going about its daily business, digging tubers, nursing babies, drying meat, all of which had already been put into a story by everyone else, so that no story would be left to tell, except the story of the one true storyteller, how he had lived in a cave for ten years, nettled by his own silence, and had at last emerged and found no one willing to listen.” — “Nettles”
February 11, 2024
I was introduced to Mary Ruefle's poetry after hearing "Pixie." It so perfectly resurrected memories of the hair salon as a child: "potions were lined up on shelves, bottles full of colored water, one had a comb suspended in it like a shark in the aquarium, perhaps I would be able to take it home..." as well as the jarring sight of myself with a pixie cut ("I was looking into the mirror at the face of a stranger., a hairless pixie with the ears of an elf." There are many poems I look forward to revisiting in this volume, including "Affordable Vacation," which begins "Pretend you are a penny, travel as one for two weeks, come home and tell your friends where you have been, where you stayed, what you saw, the people you met, and all your adventures..."
March 24, 2025
Mary Ruefle happens to have written one of my favourite poems (“Merengue”, for the curious) and therefore this blurb-less book grabbed my attention in the local poetry bookstore. Surprised the pages contained prose, I took it nonetheless.
I love these little thoughts and tales. Most of them consider the everyday with such burning specificity they elevate eating fruit, watching trees or calling a friend to true wonders. The lightness of writing and conversational style made me feel like sitting down with an old friend that chatted about their life and ideas. But don’t mistake airiness for emptiness: most stories invite contemplation and walk with you through the day, casting a new light throughout.
What a blessing to look at the world with refreshed awe.
I love these little thoughts and tales. Most of them consider the everyday with such burning specificity they elevate eating fruit, watching trees or calling a friend to true wonders. The lightness of writing and conversational style made me feel like sitting down with an old friend that chatted about their life and ideas. But don’t mistake airiness for emptiness: most stories invite contemplation and walk with you through the day, casting a new light throughout.
What a blessing to look at the world with refreshed awe.
January 15, 2024
some charming moments but as the book wore on (and at 85 pages, it shouldn't have felt as long as it did) i found it more and more self-indulgent and lacking in self-awareness.
i think i would have enjoyed this more when i was on my lydia davis bent, ca. 2013 or so. these musings on memory, friendship, small moments of the "everyday" were similarly poetic, tongue-in-cheek, and deceptively simple (in both subject matter and language/stylistic presentation).
not too familiar w/ ruefle's poetry, so maybe i should have started there, but these snatches of prose were uneven in quality/tone/content; they also convinced me that ruefle as a person must be a bit insufferable.
i think i would have enjoyed this more when i was on my lydia davis bent, ca. 2013 or so. these musings on memory, friendship, small moments of the "everyday" were similarly poetic, tongue-in-cheek, and deceptively simple (in both subject matter and language/stylistic presentation).
not too familiar w/ ruefle's poetry, so maybe i should have started there, but these snatches of prose were uneven in quality/tone/content; they also convinced me that ruefle as a person must be a bit insufferable.
August 9, 2025
I flew through this book. It felt like a conversation with a friend, that same kind of light banter even when the conversation focuses on the hard things in life. Making light of things. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, not like Madness, Rack, and Honey (which I absolutely love by the way). This is something else… it’s fun and silly but still ponders fate and death and all the ‘serious’ topics in a way that makes me smile. I smiled the whole way through “Dear Friends” especially. By the end I felt like Mary was a co-conspirator. In what? I don’t know, only she does, and I was just along for the ride, Mary at the steering wheel, yet I enjoyed every minute.
January 6, 2024
I like Ruefle's poetry, but for me it's her poetic mini-essays. She makes this kind of writing look easy with her confident bare bones style. And it's slyly FUNNY! So much so that I felt myself bracing myself for the laughs at the start of every piece. The longer piece in the middle of the book (The Book!), Dear Friends, is a big, beautiful, and wise masterpiece. I think Ruefle is a most peculiar genius.
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