Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book (Wave Books, 2023), Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, 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 serves as the state’s poet laureate.

Books by Mary Ruefle

The Book (Wave Books, 2023)

Dunce (Wave Books, 2020)

My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016)

Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013)

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)

Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010)

The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008)

Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007)

A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006)

Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2007)

The Adamant (University of Iowa Press, 1989)

Also Referenced in the Episode

Also Referenced

3 Days of Poetry hosted by Wave Books

Reading with Rachel 

The Will-O’-the-Wisps Are in Town by Hans Christian Andersen

Diane Wolkstein’s Hans Christan Anderson: Classic Stories

“Pause” by Mary Ruefle 

Mary Ruefle on David Naimon’s Between the Covers (podcast)

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Mary Ruefle on Jordan Kisner‘s Thresholds (podcast)

My Dinner with Andre (movie)

MASS MOCA ‘s Tree Logic

James Turrell

The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

Being with Dying by Joan Halifax

Biosphere 2

Spiral Jetty

Andy Goldsworthy

Ikkuyu

Hans Christian Andersen

Gutenberg Bible

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 

Kobayashi Issa 

The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass