The Book
Mary Ruefle
Finalist for the 2024 Vermont Book Award in nonfiction
Following the acclaimed 'Dunce' which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book. True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle’s legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.” With the same curiosity found in 'Madness, Rach and Honey' and 'My Private Property', Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.
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, Seven Days
There is something quite magical in the way her pieces exist within this collection, this “book,” offering the notion of genre as something wonderfully fluid. Within compact lines and wonderful flow, she offers intimate and lyric slivers of life and thinking, meditations on ordinariness that is never truly ordinary, or spectacular simply because of that ordinariness. The variations on her prose structures hold an enormity, packing nuance into every phrase. — Rob McLennan