Following the acclaimed Dunce , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book . True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle’s legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly ) “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.”  With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property , Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us. 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 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 They record small moments with sweeping scope, moments in which the speed of thought seems to outpace real time. –– Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including her most recent book Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include 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 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. Untitled     About this time I began to suspect I was never named; people called me Mary because it was convenient, or because they had heard others call me Mary, I was in the beginning named after someone else who was named Mary but I was neither this person nor the one they called Mary after her, I was nameless, and in this state I perpetually wandered among fruit and flowers and foliage, among vines and overhanging rock and untamed animals, none of whom I could name, none of whom knew my name, nor, if they did, could they speak it.  I read once that the Amazon was called the Green Hell, and if that is a name, I take it, if only as a substitute for my unknown name, which not even my parents knew when they named me Mary, after a woman who scrubbed her kitchen floor on her hands and knees, once a week, with a stiff brush.  She was kind to me and I loved her, and since her death I have dreamt of her many times, either searching for her or speaking to her, but never once in my dreams have I called her Mary, which, I suspect, is not her name, or if it once was, is no longer.