Trances Of The Blast

Description

"One of the wisest books I've read in years, and it would be a shame to think that only poets will read it."--David Kirby, "The New York Times Book Review," on "Madness, Rack, and Honey""What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle . . . any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence."--Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America, William Carlos Williams Award citation"Trances of the Blast" is a major new collection from recent National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Mary Ruefle. Full of Ruefle's particular wisdom and wit, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts--its paradoxes, failures, and loss--and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness."If only I'd understood that lonelinesswas just loneliness, only lonelinessand nothing more. But I was blind.Little did I know.If only I'd invented salt.I might have died happy.I wish I loved you, but you can't have everything."Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams 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. Her book of lectures, "Madness, Rack, and Honey," was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

Author description

Mary Ruefle is the author of "Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures," a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and "Selected Poems" (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose ("The Most of It," Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, "Go Home and Go to Bed!," (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and include the publication of "A Little White Shadow" (Wave Books, 2006). 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.