Dunce

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

"Ruefle has shown a talent for elevating her acute observations and narrative inclination well above mere anecdote to create quietly disquieting moments-a literature of barbed ambiguity and unresolved disruption."-Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

"Straightforward in form, comic and companionable in tone, blessed with the Martian gift of seeing the strange in the ordinary and vice-versa. . . "-Joel Brouwer, Poetry

"Ruefle's speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us."-Adrien Blevins, Ploughshares

"For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience."-Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America

"[She is] a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor."-Publishers Weekly

"Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness."-Tony Hoagland, On the Seawall

"Ruefle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas - surreal and lyrical and deeply moving at the same time."- Michael Klein, Los Angeles Review of Books

"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