Mary Ruefle

Bio
Reviews
Links
Audio/Video
Current Readings

Mary Ruefle is the author of the forthcoming book Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 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, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 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 (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle 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.

(Author photo by Matt Valentine)
Reviews

Straightforward in form, comic and companionable in tone, blessed with the Martian gift of seeing the strange in the ordinary and vice-versa, Ruefle is one of those poets...more likely to be loved by readers than noted by critics and professors, in part, I think, because there’s simply less to say about poems fueled by ingenuousness and wit than there is to say about “projects”... —Joel Brouwer, Poetry

It would not be inaccurate...to call the speakers of Ruefle’s poems authorities, even when they’re muddled or uncertain, which they rarely are: Ruefle’s speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us. —Adrien Blevins, Ploughshares

What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. —Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America

[She is] a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor. — Publishers Weekly

Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness. —Tony Hoagland, On the Seawall

Reviews of books by Mary Ruefle:

Trances of the Blast

Madness, Rack, and Honey

Selected Poems

The Most of It

A Little White Shadow
- Mary Ruefle’s website, featuring more of her erasure books
- Visit our very own erasures site, where you can learn more about erasure books (like A Little White Shadow), and make your own erasures!
- Read Mary Ruefle's erasure book Melody in its entirety at Gwarlingo

Poems & essays
- “Mimosa” (on Poets.org)
- “Literal” (in Boston Review)
- “Broken Spoke” (in Boston Review)
- “Open Letter to my Ancestors” (in The New Yorker)
- “On Fear” (on The Poetry Foundation)
- “Kangaroo Beach” (in Poetry Daily)
- “The Art of Happiness” (in American Poetry Review)
- Five poems (for The Essay Prize)
- “The Great Loneliness” and “The Tragic Drama of Joy” (in Fence)
- Excerpts from A Little White Shadow (on the Poetry Foundation)
- Four poems (in Storyspace)
- “Ballad” (in POOL)
- All poems by Mary Ruefle at Verse Daily

Interviews
- Bomb Magazine, with E.C. Belli
- Scroll to the bottom of this page to find a recording of Mary Ruefle's conversation with Alice Quinn at NYU
- Ryan Van Winkle interviewed Mary Ruefle in her home for the Scottish Poetry Library podcast
- Mary Ruefle discussing Selected Poems on KCRW's Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt
- Mary Ruefle discussing Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures on KCRW's Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt
- Mary Ruefle reading "Ancestors" from Selected Poems on the PBS Newshour’s Art Beat blog
- “A Certain Swirl” and “Magnificat” (in The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor)
- Mary Ruefle reading in the Poem Present reading series.
- Reading in the Lunch Poems Reading Series:

- HTMLGIANT Live Giant’s reading from Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems:
No readings are scheduled at this time.