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.
