Another I hesitate to rate. For the most part, I've no real idea what's happening in Ruefle's poems/what she intends by them. But reading through the confusion is worth it—and those few that ring out without leaving me supremely puzzled are fantastic. ( )

A delightful brain playground ( )

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/150025150323/selected-poems-by-mary-ruefle

[a:Linda Gregg|248368|Linda Gregg|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1451533066p2/248368.jpg] won the William Carlos Williams Award for Poetry in 2009. I am not aware of any other notable poet who has won this medal. But when I read all the glowing remarks about Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle, and I discovered that the collection also had won what I believed to be a coveted award, my interest in Ruefle became obsessive and a new study was on. My literary addiction cannot be helped. I am always searching for the next [a:Jack Gilbert|82593|Jack Gilbert|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1222366375p2/82593.jpg] or [a:Wallace Stevens|42920|Wallace Stevens|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1208891582p2/42920.jpg], and even amenable to reading a poet similar to [a:Raymond Carver|7363|Raymond Carver|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1201118985p2/7363.jpg]’s lyrical prose, or the basically unknown and now-dead [a:Casey Finch|231870|Casey Finch|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] who would have been a great one had he lived. Add my listening to Mary Ruefle speak on two different podcasts over the past summer of 2016 and a robust interest was stimulated for reading all her work. Here I believed I had discovered perhaps another great poet to add to my small but withering collection. Unfortunately, however, her poems became an exacting bore on me, and her bland (and wrong) words crawled across and down the page and numbered too many. Being a teacher of writing she should know this better than anyone. There are better words available if she would only listen and gaze at their beautiful faces. But the straw that finally broke my back was one of her so-called award-winning poems titled The Cart found on page 51. It begins, The empty grocery cart is beginning to roll across the empty parking lot. It’s beginning to act like Marlon Brando might if no one were watching… And that was it for me. I would much rather spend what is left of my remaining life talking about bad fruit, or even our own dying on the vine, than to suffer through one more page of what, because of it, makes so many of us hate all poetry. It is wrong to heap praise on mediocrity. ( )

Mary Ruefle is one of my favorite writers so it was no surprise to me that I loved this 2010 selection of her poems (that is, those published before her most recent collection, Trances of the Blast). Prior to the surprise appearance in 2013 of Trances, Mary had claimed to have abandoned publishing poetry and was focusing more on her erasures. She said something to the effect that there were already too many published words in the world, and now she was occupied instead with erasing them. Luckily for her readers, she changed her mind about that.

Mary's poetry has a wistful playfulness to it that is wholly unique. She displays a curiosity in her writing that is not afraid of dark corners, but that noses into them only with a desire to understand. A reader encounters many surprises in her use of language and topic. It's often difficult to determine where she is coming from, but one nice feature of this collection is a bibliography of source material with the corresponding poem titles. Armed with this list, a dedicated reader could in theory dig around for clues as to where Mary's mind was wandering when she composed these poems. ( )

She writes good, tight words. In an interesting way. And I'm glad that I'm becoming a Ruefle completist. ( )