Golden Crumbs

In Golden Crumbs, Mary Ruefle, a master of the absurd aphorism and philosophical curio, shows us ancient anchovies, poets aspiring to be birds, a cryalogue, powdered glass for dinner, friends who don’t read your poems, lovers, big houses, blue houses, big mountains and more, in a voice that is irreverent, philosophical, inimitable: world-making and world-breaking. The kinship between people, animals and landscapes is lightly, thoughtfully, crisply rendered, with emotional depths that she drops through, with ease, like a penny in a well. These texts are fun, funny, moving, melancholic and full of games, Ruefle’s voice and style enacting a playful magic that allows us to query art and ourselves in equal measure. Gathering three collections of prose – The Most of It, My Private Property and The Book – Golden Crumbs is essential reading from ‘the best prose-writing poet in America’ (Literary Hub).

‘Mary Ruefle is the kind of poet who can make Tupperware seem transcendent… [t]he charm of her poems is perhaps their most palpable quality. She can nonchalantly finish a poem with the words “bye-bye”, as though that were the way all poems secretly end. She is a poet about whom fans say things like: “Somehow Mary Ruefle has nuzzled her way into my heart, soul, mind.” And: “I love you. Where have you always been? Will you stay?”’ 
— Emily Berry, author of Unexhausted Time

‘The Book explores the bittersweetness of getting older…. In a whirlwind of people and places, Vermont’s solitude-loving poet laureate paints a pictured of a life lived in the company of many others.’
— Los Angeles Review of Books

Paperback.