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. Bringing together for the first time three of Mary Ruefle's collections of prose – The Most of It, My Private Property and The Book – Golden Crumbs is a first UK publication for one of America's greatest living poets and essayists. 

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Book (September 2023) along with Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of 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 erasure 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, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.