Mary Ruefle

I think of [Mary Ruefle|282933]'s brain scan and can't believe it's anything like mine or anyone I know. Unique and thought provoking vignettes about every imaginable subject from cashews to Jung to haikus to Dear Friends: "Then one day I picked up a magazine and read an interview with the COO (chief operating officer) of Facebook, perhaps she still is, I don't know, but she was asked how many friends she had and she said, "Over three thousand. I don't know all of them but I have met them in one shape or form." I would rather be antiquated--I would rather die--than make a statement like that. I know my friends..."and she goes on with a precise, knowing descriptions of her various friends such as: "I had a friend who loved apple trees and apple blossoms and apple orchards, he loved swimming in ponds and lake, and making current jam and jam from mulberries and playing the harmonica, but when he read, he loved books, he read heavy German tomes."
Or "I have a friend who believes that birds have souls but humans do not."
As Poetry Foundation's Janina Ambikapathy wrote "If this book is about recollection, and a meditation on the inevitable passing of all things, it is also about errors, cracks in our recall that switch the familiar world for one that is slightly strange. [Mary Ruefle|282933] writes about the fluctuating intensity of friendships, missed connections, and affections sent out into the world that bounce right back: “She kept calling, I didn’t pick up, and finally she stopped. I think she understood I was somehow not the same.” "The plum sat in the sun for three hours, its skin split apart and its syrup began to ooze out. When I bit into it, I thought of William Carlos Williams..."
"I am a tall person who is small and mean inside. For instance, I wake Christmas morning and begin to pack away all of my Christmas decorations."
Wave Books is a publisher to treasure as is this volume.… (mere)

What a treat to follow the exceptional meanderings of [a:Mary Ruefle|282933|Mary Ruefle|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1250203628p2/282933.jpg]'s mind whether she's musing about Christmas trees, little golf pencils, or menopause viewed through her cryalog ("hot flashes are the least of it"), or the art of shrunken heads seen in her youth at a Belgian museum which might comfort her as totems of her own losses. And colors like this "Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for a part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon." with a note from the poet that you can substitute the word happiness for the word sadness and nothing changes. Not unlike the times we're living through in pandemia.… (mere)

Reading Keats “Ode to a Nightingale” aloud to Swiss cows in a field is just one of the quotidian ways that Ruefle celebrates poetry.

“Altogether, I think that we ought to read books that bite snd sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all…”

There is a fine Selected Bibliography but alas no index.… (mere)