Review by New York Times Review
mary ruefle'S "My Private Property" is a book that, if not read carefully and to its very last words, almost invites the reader to underestimate it. It ends just past Page 100 - but it is hard to classify as a volume of poetry, Ruefle's most common mode of artistic expression since the early 1980s. Its 41 sections are not recognizably essays, nor lectures, like the wending but substantial prose pieces on various themes (including the theme of Theme) in her book "Madness, Rack, and Honey," from 2012. Most of her poetry books have included a few short prose pieces, which could be understood as interludes; you might reasonably think that this is a book of interludes, or itself an interlude between more important works. In fact, the first entry in the new book is a dreamlike story with the look-at-me-I'm-dinky title "Little Golf Pencil." In it, the narrator, named Mary, is asked by a police department to write a statement about a "little tree" in its courtyard that has been eaten by an animal. The cops are having lunch, and one gives her half a sandwich. It turns out her statement is to be a Christmas present for the police captain. This is the tenor of the piece: little pencil, little tree, little present, little sandwiches. "Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves," it closes, "I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me whether I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they're all so young." I read the ending twice as a slack-oracle, Jack Handey-like, half-comic performance, until I came across another writer - Rich Smith, in The Stranger - suggesting that it was a comment on the deepest, deadliest problem of policing . I think that is probably right, and that is not a little idea. Ruefle's humor is abundant but not cheap. She is strikingly uninterested in fitting any aspect of her writing into venerable literary shapes or voices. This feels like the exercising of a right. Ruefle, who was born in 1952 and lives in Bennington, Vt., says on her website that she does not own a computer - the site itself is maintained by somebody else, one assumes - and has asserted in various carefully worded print and audio interviews (some of which contain nearly as much value as her books) that she has not been to a concert in 40 years, and that wasting time is a sacrament. In her recent work, Ruefle can seem like a supernally well-read person who has grown bored with what smartness looks like, and has grown attracted to the other side. Some of her narrators here come across as inconsistent, unsure and even inarticulate, which is not the same as dumb. She is not writing with a prescription, or at least not one for this earth. Nor is she celebrating the commonplace. She is concentrating on one thing at a time and doing something that, depending on how the light strikes it, can look like weirding out or being very serious. Several of these pieces will make you want to read them out loud to amuse someone else. Especially "The Woman Who Couldn't Describe a Thing if She Could." ("The car stayed outside the restaurant and we stayed inside the restaurant. A restaurant is a place that will cook for you. You give them money for the cooking. Or for the eating, I am unsure which.") But "My Private Property" also grows very grim at times - almost without warning, and in streaks and pulses, not in a gathering wave. As a whole it is best read alone. At semiregular intervals come short, standalone passages on the sadness of certain colors. So: "It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant." (It is impossible to quote from the black-sadness passage, because it is too good to excerpt.) She returns several times to the idea of dolls and balloons, which feels sad, and also to the idea of coffins, which feels far sadder. There's also a bravura essay about her menopause. "Pause" takes the form of survivor's advice, rendered in secondperson chunks like prose stanzas, separated by section breaks, about how for 10 years you will want to smash your car, scream at strangers. etc. "A kind of wild forest blood runs in your veins," she writes. Her experience sounds dark, if we're going to stay with color-talk. But its final effect, she suggests, was to communicate to her a kind of counterintuitive insight that goes beyond dark or light or good or bad. Ruefle communicates something like that to readers, too, through language, and most of all with a single, concussive line at the end of the acknowledgments page, before the silence of the flyleaf. It suggests a different meaning for some of the pieces you have just read: maybe a much more expansive one. Again, it looks a little like a joke. ? 'When you finally understand yourself,' Ruefle says, 'you no longer understand the world.' ben ratliff was a music critic at The Times from 1996 to 2016. His latest book is "Every Song Ever"
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this collection of short essays and prose poems, Ruefle (Trances of the Blast) rambles through the quotidian and the morbid, displaying quirkiness as well as the sublime. The writing recalls fables, in that contained narratives and simple premises turn to reveal something of the human predicament. But far from offering moral instruction, Ruefle tunes into an unsettling and enlivening strangeness. In the title piece, Ruefle makes an appeal for the practice of the shrunken head as a loving burial rite, while she slyly weaves in complex questions about appropriation, ownership, and loss. A series of brief, lyrical prose poems catalogue different casts of sadness, each associated with a different color: "Black sadness is the ashling, its remains are scattered over several provinces, it is the sadness of raked and hyphenated names"; purple sadness is "words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon." Ruefle details interiority in a way that is highly mannered and charming while also deeply vulnerable. At one point, she instructs a group of eager cops "that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world." Playing through distinct notes of knowing and unknowing, Ruefle's writing strikes a chord that resonates in psychic and social realms. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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