My Private Property

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... 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. -New York Times 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... Playing through distinct notes of knowing and unknowing, Ruefle's writing strikes a chord that resonates in psychic and social realms. -Publishers Weekly The property that Ruefle deems private is the impalpable nature of the inner life we all share; it is at once ours and everyone's...Ruefle has shown a talent for elevating her acute observations and narrative inclination well above mere anecdote to create quietly disquieting moments--a literature of barbed ambiguity and unresolved disruption. -Bookforum Mary Ruefle is, in this humble bookseller's opinion, the best prose-writing poet in America. (And one of our best poets, too.) My Private Property, her latest collection of stories, essays, and asides, is as joyous and singular a book as you'll read. -Literary Hub In My Private Property, all of life can be mined for meaning-the pieces concern themselves with the small and the large without making value distinctions between the two. Ruefle deals as frequently with mundane matters-a Christmas tree, feeding a finch, crumbs on a kitchen counter-as with those capital-letter concepts: God, Love, Death, Time, Memory. Any of these "other things" can undergo some transubstantiation and become poetry. -Los Angeles Review of Books Reading her collection My Private Property, I'm struck by the conversational quality of this new work, by its anthropological spirit, and by its stubborn emphasis on the facts as Ruefle has found them. -Paris Review Mary Ruefle's careful, measured sentences sound as if they were written by a thousand-year-old person who is still genuinely curious about the world... [She] combine[s] imagistic techniques from surrealism with narrative techniques to create surprising, high-velocity, and deeply affecting work. This aesthetic has spawned many imitators and variations, but her style is unmistakable. -The Stranger I might say us dreamers have gotten ahold of the essay form. I might speak about how Mary Ruefle's prose explores the varied experience of singular feeling, feelings within feeling, braiding feelings, feeling slipping into other feelings, feelings inflecting feeling, feeling chasing feeling. [...] I might talk about how Mary Ruefle's prose makes you laugh aloud, and, in the same beat, breaks your heart. -Essay Daily