Description:
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
A finalist for both the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and a the LA Times Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award.
Through her many projects across numerous genres, Mary Ruefle has proven herself a singular artist, drawing many fans from around the world to her unique vision. With Dunce she returns to the practice that has always been at her core: the making of poems. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, which is always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.
Review Quotes:
"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