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Selected Poems
"Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter."—Tony Hoagland
"In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, [Mary Ruefle] brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world."—Charles Simic
Selected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary Ruefle's distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most expert, surprising, and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining need look no further than this monolithic retrospective by a contemporary master.
Mary Ruefle, winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems, has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book; she is also 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). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including 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, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
"In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, [Mary Ruefle] brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world."—Charles Simic
Selected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary Ruefle's distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most expert, surprising, and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining need look no further than this monolithic retrospective by a contemporary master.
Mary Ruefle, winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems, has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book; she is also 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). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including 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, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
168 pages, Hardcover
First published August 17, 2010
32 people are currently reading
1149 people want to read
About the author
Mary Ruefle
46 books432 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 93 reviews
August 7, 2021
If you're a catcher in the wry like me, you'll probably appreciate the dry humor in Mary Ruefle's poetry. And, as these are "selected," it's a good means of introducing yourself if you haven't made her acquaintance.
Specificity and trivial facts are her specialty. Sometimes, too, non sequiturs or streams that babble with consciousness. Here by way of example is a poem from the collection:
How I Became Impossible
I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to see anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
I did not like to be torched.
More snow fell than was able to melt,
I became green-eyed and in due time traveled
to other countries where I formed opinions
on hard, cold shiny objects and soft, warm,
nappy things. Late in life I began to develop
a passion for persimmons and was absolutely delighted
when a postcard arrived for the recently departed.
I became recalcitrant, spending more and more time
with my rowboat. All my life I thought polar bears
and penguins grew up together playing side by side
on the ice, sharing the same vista, bits of blubber
and innocent lore. One day I read a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.
Or how about this for size:
My Happiness
I laid my happiness in a field
My happiness lay in the field and looked up at the sky
My happiness extended the same courtesy to the clouds
My happiness in the field was visible for miles around
My happiness was visible to the hawk
My happiness was fond of the beetle beside it
A porcupine lumbered by
My happiness followed it
Perhaps because it was being followed
the porcupine "stole" my happiness
My happiness lumbered along after itself, happily
We came to a road
The porcupine went into a culvert and didn't come out
And that was the end of my happiness
I guess that says it better than I can. If it makes you happy, you can call this book YOUR happiness, too.
Specificity and trivial facts are her specialty. Sometimes, too, non sequiturs or streams that babble with consciousness. Here by way of example is a poem from the collection:
How I Became Impossible
I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to see anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
I did not like to be torched.
More snow fell than was able to melt,
I became green-eyed and in due time traveled
to other countries where I formed opinions
on hard, cold shiny objects and soft, warm,
nappy things. Late in life I began to develop
a passion for persimmons and was absolutely delighted
when a postcard arrived for the recently departed.
I became recalcitrant, spending more and more time
with my rowboat. All my life I thought polar bears
and penguins grew up together playing side by side
on the ice, sharing the same vista, bits of blubber
and innocent lore. One day I read a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.
Or how about this for size:
My Happiness
I laid my happiness in a field
My happiness lay in the field and looked up at the sky
My happiness extended the same courtesy to the clouds
My happiness in the field was visible for miles around
My happiness was visible to the hawk
My happiness was fond of the beetle beside it
A porcupine lumbered by
My happiness followed it
Perhaps because it was being followed
the porcupine "stole" my happiness
My happiness lumbered along after itself, happily
We came to a road
The porcupine went into a culvert and didn't come out
And that was the end of my happiness
I guess that says it better than I can. If it makes you happy, you can call this book YOUR happiness, too.
August 5, 2014
Dear Library of Congress,
Please make Mary Ruefle the next Poet Laureate.
Yours,
Ravi
Also - How many DVDs can I take out at a time?
Please make Mary Ruefle the next Poet Laureate.
Yours,
Ravi
Also - How many DVDs can I take out at a time?
October 11, 2010
I carry this volume everywhere. It's become one of my favorite collections. Mary once wrote me: "Jon, this poem doesn't prepare me for my death." And I had to agree, the poem I sent her didn't do that, didn't even have that as a goal because it wasn't aware that poems could do so. But these poems, Mary's poems, they do that. This is a wonderful selection from a lifetime's fearless dedication to poetry.
October 12, 2018
"I hear over in China
people break a willow branch
whenever they say goodbye" (15).
I read this collection of poetry over a series of two days and found myself drawn in by a number of images and stories around death, religion, faith and the position the person has in society. Ruefle did not make me overly emotional however, and I tend to pride that in my readings. This was however, an enjoyable selection of poems.
Throughout the collection Ruefle plays lightly with form, her lyrical verses ebbing and flowing with line length and sometimes read as prose. One particular favourite within the collection is 'Heaven on Earth' (17) which is divided into a series of parts. The changes in structure, physical to the eye were really useful and engaging.
"What book will you be reading when you die?
If it's a good one, you won't finish it.
If it's a bad one, what a shame" (44).
I think were I to be studying Ruefle in class. I would be able to consider a deeper depth to her poems than that of train reads on my line. Her use of animal imagery, colours and word choices are all sharp and deserve further exploration that I have not been able to give at this point in time. Regardless, a truly incredible collection that has me considering many different things (the above quote in particular about whether or not to give up reading books I hate or not. But also I love reading and each book whether I like it or not deserves reviewing? But yeah, big questions).
If you're looking for an entry point into poetry, nothing too intense, but plays with form and line length easily, Mary Ruefle I think is a good place to start!
people break a willow branch
whenever they say goodbye" (15).
I read this collection of poetry over a series of two days and found myself drawn in by a number of images and stories around death, religion, faith and the position the person has in society. Ruefle did not make me overly emotional however, and I tend to pride that in my readings. This was however, an enjoyable selection of poems.
Throughout the collection Ruefle plays lightly with form, her lyrical verses ebbing and flowing with line length and sometimes read as prose. One particular favourite within the collection is 'Heaven on Earth' (17) which is divided into a series of parts. The changes in structure, physical to the eye were really useful and engaging.
"What book will you be reading when you die?
If it's a good one, you won't finish it.
If it's a bad one, what a shame" (44).
I think were I to be studying Ruefle in class. I would be able to consider a deeper depth to her poems than that of train reads on my line. Her use of animal imagery, colours and word choices are all sharp and deserve further exploration that I have not been able to give at this point in time. Regardless, a truly incredible collection that has me considering many different things (the above quote in particular about whether or not to give up reading books I hate or not. But also I love reading and each book whether I like it or not deserves reviewing? But yeah, big questions).
If you're looking for an entry point into poetry, nothing too intense, but plays with form and line length easily, Mary Ruefle I think is a good place to start!
July 30, 2017
A wonderful collection of Mary Ruefle's poetry. Ruefle is a master of wit. She manages to be strangely, even absurdly funny as she communicates the existential insecurities of daily life. Her poems tackle the difficulties of self-expression and the uncertainty of happiness and subjective experience, among other concerns. All of her work here contains a unique, confiding, and baffling voice, which I found deeply engaging and oftentimes poignant. I really loved "Heaven on Earth," "How It Is," "The Wild Rose Bush," "Mercy," "The Feast," "Why I Am Not a Good Kisser," "Kiss of the Sun," "After a Rain," and "Lullaby," but there are so many other gems in here. Would recommend!
January 8, 2014
I loved the first half of this book. The imagery was novel and vivid, the emotions intense. Each one had an interesting narrative view. But then I shut down about half way through. That happens to me a lot with poetry. I sometimes wonder if poetry like dessert isn't so rich that when you consume too much you lose your taste for it.
December 15, 2010
Yes yes yes! Mary is the madame of the poetic turn. Her turns and leaps are wild, yet somehow totally integrated.
Thank you Mary and thank you Wave for hours of inspiration. I am going to read this beautiful book again & again
Thank you Mary and thank you Wave for hours of inspiration. I am going to read this beautiful book again & again
February 15, 2014
Have a chat with Mary Ruefle. I mean read her book. The conversation is going to be odd. But that will be pleasant, and alienating in an agreeable way. Do it again.
December 7, 2011
These generally playful poems seem to be less concerned with Things than with The-Relationships-Between-Things, be these relationships familial, geographical, or purely conceptual. The names-of-things that appear in these poems (e.g., the blue orchids in the poem "Perfume River," or the deer antlers in "The Beautiful is Negative") have little or no importance in themselves; rather, their raison-d'etre is to serve as counters in a conceptual game of relationships, connections, and linkages. Consider, for instance, the poem "Nice Hands":
"I was born in a hospital….Five years later
my brain was a lightbulb that flickered on and off,
my soul was a milk bottle yearning to be full,
my stomach, made of concrete, had a long wooden table
where six dressed kittens sat, holding up their bowls."
The reader is led to wonder: what makes kittens a particularly apt metaphor for the stomach? What makes lightbulbs a particularly apt metaphor for the brain? As it turns out, absolutely nothing: later in the poem, Ruefle freely moves around the counters on her conceptual checkerboard, reassigning the kitten metaphor to the brain and reassigning the lightbulb metaphor to the stomach:
"Now my stomach has the pizzazz of a hundred colored bulbs.
The cats have grown, scattered, multiplied
in my brain, where they fight over milk spilt
from the bottle…"
Ruefle's mathematician-esque fascination with structure, her insistence on foregrounding the abstract relationships that can be constructed among a more-or-less-arbitrary collection of objects, reminds me of several other contemporary poets; not the least of these is "Praise"-era Robert Hass, who engaged in similar wordplay in poems like "Heroic Simile." With her frequent allusions to Asian culture and the cinema, Ruefle openly invites comparison to such poems as Hass's "Heroic Simile." At other times, Ruefle's work bears a striking affinity with the poetry of Jack Gilbert, or Dean Young (note the weird resonance between the ending of Ruefle's poem "At the North Pole" and the ending of Young's poem "Ready-Made Bouquet"!).
The philosopher Simone Weil once said, "Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link." Ruefle is fully aware of this truth, and, by focusing on the linkages that connect disparate things, she, in effect, draws our attention to the distances that separate things from one another. In particular, many of Ruefle's poems ("Patient Without an Acre," "All the Activity There Is," "How It Is") emphasize the distances that lie between Things-As-They-Are and the way we perceive them, the way we speak about them, and the way we portray them in art. When, at the end of one particularly beautiful poem, Ruefle says, "And the litchi! it's like swallowing a pearl," it's the word "like" that gives the line its wistful beauty, for the word "like" simultaneously expresses the similarity and the unbridgeable difference between litchis and pearls.
Aside from a couple of early stunners (most notably, "Sentimental Education"), my favorite poems in this collection were those in the last 20 pages, because those, being more serious and rooted in reality than the rest, were the most emotionally moving.
"I was born in a hospital….Five years later
my brain was a lightbulb that flickered on and off,
my soul was a milk bottle yearning to be full,
my stomach, made of concrete, had a long wooden table
where six dressed kittens sat, holding up their bowls."
The reader is led to wonder: what makes kittens a particularly apt metaphor for the stomach? What makes lightbulbs a particularly apt metaphor for the brain? As it turns out, absolutely nothing: later in the poem, Ruefle freely moves around the counters on her conceptual checkerboard, reassigning the kitten metaphor to the brain and reassigning the lightbulb metaphor to the stomach:
"Now my stomach has the pizzazz of a hundred colored bulbs.
The cats have grown, scattered, multiplied
in my brain, where they fight over milk spilt
from the bottle…"
Ruefle's mathematician-esque fascination with structure, her insistence on foregrounding the abstract relationships that can be constructed among a more-or-less-arbitrary collection of objects, reminds me of several other contemporary poets; not the least of these is "Praise"-era Robert Hass, who engaged in similar wordplay in poems like "Heroic Simile." With her frequent allusions to Asian culture and the cinema, Ruefle openly invites comparison to such poems as Hass's "Heroic Simile." At other times, Ruefle's work bears a striking affinity with the poetry of Jack Gilbert, or Dean Young (note the weird resonance between the ending of Ruefle's poem "At the North Pole" and the ending of Young's poem "Ready-Made Bouquet"!).
The philosopher Simone Weil once said, "Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link." Ruefle is fully aware of this truth, and, by focusing on the linkages that connect disparate things, she, in effect, draws our attention to the distances that separate things from one another. In particular, many of Ruefle's poems ("Patient Without an Acre," "All the Activity There Is," "How It Is") emphasize the distances that lie between Things-As-They-Are and the way we perceive them, the way we speak about them, and the way we portray them in art. When, at the end of one particularly beautiful poem, Ruefle says, "And the litchi! it's like swallowing a pearl," it's the word "like" that gives the line its wistful beauty, for the word "like" simultaneously expresses the similarity and the unbridgeable difference between litchis and pearls.
Aside from a couple of early stunners (most notably, "Sentimental Education"), my favorite poems in this collection were those in the last 20 pages, because those, being more serious and rooted in reality than the rest, were the most emotionally moving.
July 26, 2011
Reading through Mary Ruefle’s new Selected Poems, published by Wave Books and culled from her ten books of poetry, I notice two threads run through all the work: one is an element of light-handed humor, and the other is the echo of Biblical language and subject matter. References to artifice and art also reappear throughout her poems, signaling that Ruefle wants the reader to stay aware of context and linguistic maneuvers.
Her language is simple and direct, even when the poem itself is not; one of the enjoyable paradoxes of reading Ruefle’s work is how easy it is to read, but how many possible meanings you can make. Though sometimes described as an experimental or “post-avant” poet, I have always found Ruefle’s work intelligently accessible, charming and reader-friendly. Her poems tend to absurdism – a poem titled “Barbarians” describes a field of lounging cows, while “My Happiness” follows a meandering porcupine.
Read the rest of my review at The Rumpus here:
http://therumpus.net/2010/09/two-thre...
Her language is simple and direct, even when the poem itself is not; one of the enjoyable paradoxes of reading Ruefle’s work is how easy it is to read, but how many possible meanings you can make. Though sometimes described as an experimental or “post-avant” poet, I have always found Ruefle’s work intelligently accessible, charming and reader-friendly. Her poems tend to absurdism – a poem titled “Barbarians” describes a field of lounging cows, while “My Happiness” follows a meandering porcupine.
Read the rest of my review at The Rumpus here:
http://therumpus.net/2010/09/two-thre...
February 20, 2011
Well, this was as stunning as people have told me. One of the most original and engaging poets writing today, as far as I'm concerned. Truly one of a kind (although if I tried to describe her through the lens of other poets, I would say she recalls both Wislawa Szymborska's occasionally gothic sense of humor, and Dean Young's mode of surprising juxtapositions).
Lyrical, moving, sharp, weird--I have major love for this book.
Favorite poems-- "The Beautiful is Negative," "Timberland," "Cul-de-sac," "Perpetually Attempting to Soar," "Tilapia" (how I love the last two lines: "I will ask for a lemon. This act, ounce for ounce, if executed / in perfect faith, will rip the cellophane off the world."), "Sentimental Education," "Concerning Essential Existence," "How I Became Impossible," "My Happiness," "Kiss of the Sun" (my fave in the book), and "After a Rain." Just looking at this list, it looks like my faves are scattered throughout her oevre, with her latest book "Indeed I was Pleased with the World" having a few more than the others. I should read that book in its entirety.
Lyrical, moving, sharp, weird--I have major love for this book.
Favorite poems-- "The Beautiful is Negative," "Timberland," "Cul-de-sac," "Perpetually Attempting to Soar," "Tilapia" (how I love the last two lines: "I will ask for a lemon. This act, ounce for ounce, if executed / in perfect faith, will rip the cellophane off the world."), "Sentimental Education," "Concerning Essential Existence," "How I Became Impossible," "My Happiness," "Kiss of the Sun" (my fave in the book), and "After a Rain." Just looking at this list, it looks like my faves are scattered throughout her oevre, with her latest book "Indeed I was Pleased with the World" having a few more than the others. I should read that book in its entirety.
July 16, 2012
Finished and now I will read all over again.
September 19, 2018
These poems were selected because they are better than Twitter
December 30, 2020
Mary is my new idol. Her ability to guide the reader through unexpected turns and land somewhere with wow factor is astonishing.
March 25, 2021
Ruefle’s writing is like a puppy, bouncing from one toy to the next. Each line is full of energy. I firmly believe that Ruefle’s poems are not meant to be dissected. There’s no deep meaning, no deep truth to life, that you can unearth by digging through the poem with pen and highlighter. Her poems, I believe, are meant to be enjoyed as one enjoys a symphony. You listen and you feel. You can dig for treasure in her poem, but you’ll be disappointed. The treasure is the way the electric word choice draws you in and makes you feel all the wild feelings. You could spend hours attempting to connect and the bizarre and interesting turns the poems take, Ruefle does not sit on one image too long, but you will struggle to find one that makes sense. To find the connection you need to let go of being analytical and just let the feeling of the poem drive you.
January 28, 2023
Another I hesitate to rate. For the most part, I've no real idea what's happening in Ruefle's poems/what she intends by them. But reading through the confusion is worth it—and those few that ring out without leaving me supremely puzzled are fantastic.
January 30, 2018
Interesting, but not really my favorite
April 27, 2021
Some of these went WHOOSH right over my head and the rest provided a witty, existential nut punch. Basically, I couldn't put it down.
January 24, 2022
3.5 stars.
There is some beauty in Ruefle's poetry to be sure but the lack of context in most of the poems left me unsatisfied.
There is some beauty in Ruefle's poetry to be sure but the lack of context in most of the poems left me unsatisfied.
July 15, 2024
I like what I like, and this is what I like.
January 19, 2025
Excellent early poems from 1982 to 2007. She could very well become one of my favorite poets!
September 6, 2016
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1500251...
Linda Gregg won the William Carlos Williams Award for Poetry in 2009. I am not aware of any other notable poet who has won this medal. But when I read all the glowing remarks about Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle, and I discovered that the collection also had won what I believed to be a coveted award, my interest in Ruefle became obsessive and a new study was on. My literary addiction cannot be helped. I am always searching for the next Jack Gilbert or Wallace Stevens, and even amenable to reading a poet similar to Raymond Carver’s lyrical prose, or the basically unknown and now-dead Casey Finch who would have been a great one had he lived. Add my listening to Mary Ruefle speak on two different podcasts over the past summer of 2016 and a robust interest was stimulated for reading all her work. Here I believed I had discovered perhaps another great poet to add to my small but withering collection. Unfortunately, however, her poems became an exacting bore on me, and her bland (and wrong) words crawled across and down the page and numbered too many. Being a teacher of writing she should know this better than anyone. There are better words available if she would only listen and gaze at their beautiful faces. But the straw that finally broke my back was one of her so-called award-winning poems titled The Cart found on page 51. It begins, The empty grocery cart is beginning to roll across the empty parking lot. It’s beginning to act like Marlon Brando might if no one were watching… And that was it for me. I would much rather spend what is left of my remaining life talking about bad fruit, or even our own dying on the vine, than to suffer through one more page of what, because of it, makes so many of us hate all poetry. It is wrong to heap praise on mediocrity.
Linda Gregg won the William Carlos Williams Award for Poetry in 2009. I am not aware of any other notable poet who has won this medal. But when I read all the glowing remarks about Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle, and I discovered that the collection also had won what I believed to be a coveted award, my interest in Ruefle became obsessive and a new study was on. My literary addiction cannot be helped. I am always searching for the next Jack Gilbert or Wallace Stevens, and even amenable to reading a poet similar to Raymond Carver’s lyrical prose, or the basically unknown and now-dead Casey Finch who would have been a great one had he lived. Add my listening to Mary Ruefle speak on two different podcasts over the past summer of 2016 and a robust interest was stimulated for reading all her work. Here I believed I had discovered perhaps another great poet to add to my small but withering collection. Unfortunately, however, her poems became an exacting bore on me, and her bland (and wrong) words crawled across and down the page and numbered too many. Being a teacher of writing she should know this better than anyone. There are better words available if she would only listen and gaze at their beautiful faces. But the straw that finally broke my back was one of her so-called award-winning poems titled The Cart found on page 51. It begins, The empty grocery cart is beginning to roll across the empty parking lot. It’s beginning to act like Marlon Brando might if no one were watching… And that was it for me. I would much rather spend what is left of my remaining life talking about bad fruit, or even our own dying on the vine, than to suffer through one more page of what, because of it, makes so many of us hate all poetry. It is wrong to heap praise on mediocrity.
July 22, 2023
These I read one per night over as many nights as there are poems. That's my absorption level. Even read "The Great Loneliness" to a financial adviser, since she and I were fretting about how long over a projected lifetime to stretch the numbers we saw rise like very modest hills on the screen.
One can learn from these poems. They're not sentimental; indeed, the tumble of their imagery is a kind of wild ride suggesting surreal directions, but not (as 'surrealist' poetry often does) incoherently placing us to no arguable purpose in a new fantasy every five words.
Going into and around these poems is part traversing a fun house, part listening for the murmur of 'another world', part re-orienting in the aftermath of an ambiguous dream. But their object isn't to baffle a reader. Once each poem completes, reality startles us.
It's odd that, being schooled in poetry and being awake to 'the contemporary poetry world' actively for 30 years, I'd never been shown one of her works. Really much better than many poets who have sturdy followings and little but personal recollection or political program to offer.
One can learn from these poems. They're not sentimental; indeed, the tumble of their imagery is a kind of wild ride suggesting surreal directions, but not (as 'surrealist' poetry often does) incoherently placing us to no arguable purpose in a new fantasy every five words.
Going into and around these poems is part traversing a fun house, part listening for the murmur of 'another world', part re-orienting in the aftermath of an ambiguous dream. But their object isn't to baffle a reader. Once each poem completes, reality startles us.
It's odd that, being schooled in poetry and being awake to 'the contemporary poetry world' actively for 30 years, I'd never been shown one of her works. Really much better than many poets who have sturdy followings and little but personal recollection or political program to offer.
June 19, 2015
"Nice Hands"
I was born in a hospital. I stank.
They washed me. Five years later
my brain was a lightbulb that flickered on and off,
my soul was a milk bottle yearning to be full,
my stomach, made of concrete, had a long wooden table
where six dressed kittens sat, holding up their bowls.
No my stomach has the pizzazzz of a hundred colored bulbs
hanging by a wire over a cantina where someone in a white sheet
is learning to pour wine on the altar.
The cats have grown, scattered, multiplied
in my brain where they fight over milk spilt
from the bottle, described now as an odalisque,
their cat hair standing on end.
And my soul is the concrete room
with an unstable card table where no one plays and nothing feeds,
though when I die there's always the chance
someone with nice hands will wash me.
…
Beautiful, riveting poems, flush with imagery, anguish, intensity and hope. Though not all of them are of the same wild quality, the most of them are stunning and spiritual and filled with the heart of the author.
Reufle is a tremendous and beautiful talent, and I feel blessed to have encountered her poetry. Highly recommended.
I was born in a hospital. I stank.
They washed me. Five years later
my brain was a lightbulb that flickered on and off,
my soul was a milk bottle yearning to be full,
my stomach, made of concrete, had a long wooden table
where six dressed kittens sat, holding up their bowls.
No my stomach has the pizzazzz of a hundred colored bulbs
hanging by a wire over a cantina where someone in a white sheet
is learning to pour wine on the altar.
The cats have grown, scattered, multiplied
in my brain where they fight over milk spilt
from the bottle, described now as an odalisque,
their cat hair standing on end.
And my soul is the concrete room
with an unstable card table where no one plays and nothing feeds,
though when I die there's always the chance
someone with nice hands will wash me.
…
Beautiful, riveting poems, flush with imagery, anguish, intensity and hope. Though not all of them are of the same wild quality, the most of them are stunning and spiritual and filled with the heart of the author.
Reufle is a tremendous and beautiful talent, and I feel blessed to have encountered her poetry. Highly recommended.
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May 14, 2019I am not in the right mindset for anything but theory currently, I think. Fiction overwhelms and nauseates, so I thought poetry would help. But this fell flat, only a handfull of these poems moved me. Certain fiction and poetry do the same for me, which is what I want in general these days, the feeling of being injected with emotion-- feeling-- passion--heartache--essence--? and I fully expected that from this. And was ultimately disappointed, but again might be this broken brain of mine, and not the poetry. Or I guess my very narrow desire, which I consider to be everything at the moment.
(It was often quite beautiful, but beauty isn't always moving, or as evocative as needed)
(It was often quite beautiful, but beauty isn't always moving, or as evocative as needed)
December 29, 2023
3.5? I think?
This was definitely a challenge for me. The poems float from image to image, and it’s often hard to parse what they’re about. I looked up an interview to better understand Ruefle’s process but she literally said she doesn’t care if her poetry makes sense to other people, so I decided to roll with it. When I did understand a poem, it usually moved me. All of the images were surprising and often Ruefle explores almost cosmic themes. I’ll definitely pick up more of her writing, perhaps her prose, soon.
This was definitely a challenge for me. The poems float from image to image, and it’s often hard to parse what they’re about. I looked up an interview to better understand Ruefle’s process but she literally said she doesn’t care if her poetry makes sense to other people, so I decided to roll with it. When I did understand a poem, it usually moved me. All of the images were surprising and often Ruefle explores almost cosmic themes. I’ll definitely pick up more of her writing, perhaps her prose, soon.
March 31, 2011
This was a gift from my brother for Christmas. I had never read any of Mary Ruefle's work, but I absolutely fell in love with her through this. It's an absolutely gorgeous collection. I'll definitely be checking out her other books!
October 11, 2014
I really like Ruefle, but she's quirky enough that I have to be in the mood. I know I'll return to this book from time to time. But I did find while reading it that a steady diet of her was not what I wanted.
December 22, 2014
Mary Ruefle's poems make me want to write poetry. They are accessible, but still totally weird, and have caused me to observe and interact with the day to day a little bit more curiously. I am excited to keep interacting with these poems.
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