Golden Crumbs

Mary Ruefle author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions

Publishing:8th Oct '26

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 8th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Golden Crumbs cover

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 ItMy Private Property and The Book – Golden Crumbs is a first UK publication for one of America's greatest living poets and essayists. 

‘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

ISBN: 9781804272824

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

264 pages