Dunce

Death is old news in Dunce, the gaze here candid and unflinching, but not without moments of fragility and tenderness. Adorned with no additional emotion, sandbagged by no additional weight, mortality is just another guest on these pages. Ruefle offers the mind as a simple platter, attentiveness with no ulterior scheme, no allegiance to all those usual hierarchies. The poems collect scenes of the world, full of pivots and associative twists, darkly funny and frank and tender.
Zoë Bodzas, The Poetry Project

…reading this book of poems, maybe more than some of her others, is an experience that echoes reading her erasures….because reading erasures requires belief in the blankness and delight in what discoveries are found there, which is also true of these poems. 
Amanda Rybin Koob, Newfound

The ostensible occasions of Ruefle’s poems are minor: not the funeral, but the bath. They record small moments with sweeping scope, moments in which the speed of thought seems to outpace real time.
Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

Ruefle delivers a giddy, incisive ode to failure, fragility, and unknowing in her 12th book. “It may be our heads/ are filled with feathers/ from the stuff/ we don’t know,” she hazards, tiptoeing through one after another outlandish scenario sketched with uncanny delicacy. Many of these poems conceal sly fragments of lyric allusion or history: “I loved to wander, utterly alone”; “The fourteenth way of looking at/ a blackbird is mine.” Rhymes abound as though refusing resistance to such play, and a poem that opens in euphoria (“What a beautiful day for a wedding!”) ends, just a few lines later, in despair (“I hate my poems”). However, the poet reassures the reader that such states are kindred, even twinned. Ruefle celebrates the world’s imagination and mystery: “I want to thank my clothes for protecting my body. I want to/ fold them properly—I want/ the energy that flows from my hands/ to engulf the world./ Upon reflection, this is not/ possible. Upon reflection/ it is I who am pummeled by/ the world, that vast massage/ machine.” These poems grace the readers with wonder, wisdom, and whim “conducted/ without compromise,” securing Ruefle’s reputation among poets as the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.
Publishers Weekly, starred review

Each poem radiates with the intensity of her attention and reveals the mysteriousness deep within daily life.
Lisa Grgas, The Adroit Journal

“A Morning Person” opens with “what a beautiful day for a wedding!” Less than 20 lines later it ends, “I hate my poems.” What happens in between, all the places Ruefle takes us – her willing readers – is unrelenting attentiveness to everyday occurrences and imaginative flights, and the porous border between them. We need both to live.
John Yau, Hyperallergic

Ruefle makes the impossible connect, and her connections seem comforting, and all-encompassing.
Rob Mclennan

In these hilarious and melancholy poems Ruefle fears she has become a dunce, then she wonders if that’s so very bad given the alternatives offered in our difficult times.
Michael Silverblatt, KCRW

Her observant, humorous, tender, heartbreaking, atmospheric writing is the kind of writing to have in your backpack (just in case) at all times.
Ben Niespodziany, neonpajamas

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including including, most recently, The Book (September 2023), along with Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), 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 also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is 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 the Robert Creeley Award, 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, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate. Her forthcoming book of prose, The Book , will be published in 2023.