Mary Ruefle Selected Works

Through her many projects across numerous genres, Mary Ruefle has proven herself a singular artist, drawing many fans from around the world to her unique vision. With Dunce she returns to the practice that has always been at her core: the making of poems. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, which is always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.    

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations.

Mary Ruefle continues to be one of the most dazzling poets in America. My Private Property, comprised of short prose pieces, is a brilliant and charming display of her humor, deep imagination, mindfulness, and play.

"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 fluently unpredictable free verse (mostly) and discursive poetic prose (on occasion), Ruefle's work can take in almost anything, the more unexpected the better: 'a line of laundry strung out over the Acropolis,' 'wigs and temperatures and horoscopes,' 'the moon in utero,' drum majorettes, breast milk, the Book of Job and more." —Publishers Weekly