Mary Ruefle’s Trances of the Blast – Hardcover Edition

Description

Wave Books, hardcover

Publication Date: October 10, 2013

Publisher Marketing: 

“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 loneliness
was just loneliness, only loneliness
and 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.

Explore more from our collection.