Golden Crumbs

‘[Ruefle’s] work is funny, surprising, melancholy and beautiful. It veers between inventive slants on mundanity (an encounter with a street-cleaning truck) and altogether more high-concept ideas (a land overrun by clouds). Her nearest neighbours, I would say, are Lydia Davis, Donald Barthelme and Italo Calvino. Like each of them, she is an experimental writer in the truest sense: she constantly tries stuff out and it might not always work. But when it does you experience the thrill of feeling new ground being broken.’
— Chris Power, Observer

‘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