The Book

Reviews / Votes

The potent pieces resist easy interpretation, sparkling with the suggestiveness of Ruefle's poetry. Readers will marvel at the results.
Publishers Weekly

The presiding spirit of the poems is an amiable if world-weary explorer, curious about everything yet knowing that each answer begets another question. Ruefle's writing is whimsical, in the sense that it often follows a flight of fancy to its furthest point, with little regard for anything but the process of discovery. The trajectory of any given piece might be compared to a drawing of the looping flight path of a bee. Often they have the effects of riddles or monologues delivered by oddball narrators.
Emily Berry, London Review of Books

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