My Private Property
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Author of Madness, Rack, and Honey ("One of the wisest books I've read in years," according to the New York Times) and Trances of the Blast, Mary Ruefle continues to be one of the most dazzling poets in America. My Private Property, comprised of short prose pieces, is a brilliant and charming display of her humor, deep imagination, mindfulness, and play in a finely crafted edition.
Personalia
When I was young, a fortune-teller told me that an old woman who wanted to die had accidentally become lodged in my body. Slowly, over time, and taking great care in following esoteric instructions, including lavender baths and the ritual burial of keys in the backyard, I rid myself of her presence. Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live; I work on her.
Mary Ruefle is the author of Trances of the Blast; Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism; and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!; she is also an erasure artist whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries as well as published in the book A Little White Shadow. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of short essays and prose poems, Ruefle (Trances of the Blast) rambles through the quotidian and the morbid, displaying quirkiness as well as the sublime. The writing recalls fables, in that contained narratives and simple premises turn to reveal something of the human predicament. But far from offering moral instruction, Ruefle tunes into an unsettling and enlivening strangeness. In the title piece, Ruefle makes an appeal for the practice of the shrunken head as a loving burial rite, while she slyly weaves in complex questions about appropriation, ownership, and loss. A series of brief, lyrical prose poems catalogue different casts of sadness, each associated with a different color: "Black sadness is the ashling, its remains are scattered over several provinces, it is the sadness of raked and hyphenated names"; purple sadness is "words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon." Ruefle details interiority in a way that is highly mannered and charming while also deeply vulnerable. At one point, she instructs a group of eager cops "that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world." Playing through distinct notes of knowing and unknowing, Ruefle's writing strikes a chord that resonates in psychic and social realms.
