Golden Crumbs

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book, Dunce, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, My Private Property, Trances of the Blast, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Robert Creeley Award, 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, where she was poet laureate from 2019–2024.

‘Mary Ruefle is the kind of poet who can make Tupperware seem transcendent... [t]he charm of her poems is perhaps their most palpable quality. She can nonchalantly finish a poem with the words “bye-bye”, as though that were the way all poems secretly end. She is a poet about whom fans say things like: “Somehow Mary Ruefle has nuzzled her way into my heart, soul, mind.” And: “I love you. Where have you always been? Will you stay?”’ — Emily Berry, author of Unexhausted Time