A career-defining retrospective by a much-beloved contemporary master.

Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems gathers together the finest work from her distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most brilliant, expert and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining, need look no further than this capacious retrospective.

Winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award

Her language is simple and direct, even when the poem itself is not; one of the enjoyable paradoxes of reading Ruefle’s work is how easy it is to read, but how many possible meanings you can make. Though sometimes described as an experimental or “post-avant” poet, I have always found Ruefle’s work intelligently accessible, charming and reader-friendly. Her poems tend to absurdism – a poem titled “Barbarians” describes a field of lounging cows, while “My Happiness” follows a meandering porcupine. — Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus

Wave Books, 2010, 176pages.