Mary Ruefle is the author of Trances of the Blast (2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (2007); 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 (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, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
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The AdamantPoemsFrom"Lo and Behold"
Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open.
Especially beautiful
are the brown and drunken bats
who nosedive down the barnside,
not quite earthbroken.
The Adamant:Poems -
The AdamantPoemsFrom"Said Christina"
When I’m one white jawbone
with an army of molars
how strange it will be
for Uranians
or Plutonians to arrive
and find my ashtray
with the crashed white stubs,
some with red rings,
and never know the language:
never guess mouths
drifting from kiss to kiss
made words
driving the spaceships in.
The Adamant:Poems -
The AdamantPoemsFrom"The Last Supper"
It made a dazzling display:
the table set with the meat
from half of a walnut, a fly
on a purple grape, the grape
lit from within and the fly
bearing small black eggs.
We gathered round the oval table
with our knives, starved
for some inner feast.
We were not allowed to eat,
as we had been hired as models
by the man at our head.
Days passed
in which we grew faint with hunger.
Later we were told
that although we did not appear
on the canvas
our eyes devouring these things
provided the infinite light.
The Adamant:Poems
“As a verbal hunter-gatherer, Ruefle is a barometer of our lyric listening. Her poems are sieves of consciousness, catching strangeness and mundanity, the overheard and the under the breath . . . Ruefle reminds us how odd, synthetic, and arduous it is—the pursuit of this transmission of verbal fact and form. If you want to know how an early 21st-century lyric poem gets made, and how it is tethered to the rhetorics and resources of its time and place, start here.” —B.K. Rischer, Boston Review [on Trances of the Blast]
“Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it. Don’t be surprised if this book is remembered as a classic of its genre.” —Lisa Wells, The Rumpus
“As soon as you’ve landed somewhere, Ruefle is already on to something else. When Dickinson suggested ‘tell it slant,’ she was also saying look somewhere else, and Ruefle is always looking somewhere else. What makes her so different from her contemporaries is how the central power of the poems comes from an encounter with the imagination and not so much with any a ha! moment about reality.” —Michael Klein, Los Angeles Review of Books [on Selected Poems]
Selected Works
