Description

In Golden Crumbs, Mary Ruefle, a master of the absurd aphorism and philosophical curio, shows us ancient anchovies, poets aspiring to be birds, a cryalogue, powdered glass for dinner, friends who don’t read your poems, lovers, big houses, blue houses, big mountains and more, in a voice that is irreverent, philosophical, inimitable: world-making and world-breaking. The kinship between people, animals and landscapes is lightly, thoughtfully, crisply rendered, with emotional depths that she drops through, with ease, like a penny in a well. These texts are fun, funny, moving, melancholic and full of games, Ruefle’s voice and style enacting a playful magic that allows us to query art and ourselves in equal measure. Bringing together for the first time three of Mary Ruefle’s collections of prose – The Most of It, My Private Property and The Book – Golden Crumbs is a first UK publication for one of America’s greatest living poets and essayists.

Publisher Review

‘Mary Ruefle is the kind of poet who can make Tupperware seem transcendent… [t]he charm of her poems is perhaps their most palpable quality. She can nonchalantly finish a poem with the words “bye-bye”, as though that were the way all poems secretly end. She is a poet about whom fans say things like: “Somehow Mary Ruefle has nuzzled her way into my heart, soul, mind.” And: “I love you. Where have you always been? Will you stay?”‘

– Emily Berry, author of Unexhausted Time ‘The Book explores the bittersweetness of getting older…. In a whirlwind of people and places, Vermont’s solitude-loving poet laureate paints a pictured of a life lived in the company of many others.’

– Los Angeles Review of Books ‘The potent pieces resist easy interpretation, sparkling with the suggestiveness of Ruefle’s poetry. Readers will marvel at the results.’

– Publishers Weekly ‘Ruefle has excelled in writing agile, syncopated free verse, but her prose poems are even more unusual. Her investigations in the genre have yielded a sound all her own. You hear in these new poems how poetic prose can absorb and parody the regular prose of daily life: articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, legal documents, business correspondence.’

– Jim Schley, author of As When, In Season