Trances of the Blast

By Mary Ruefle Description Reviews Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from beloved and award-winning poet Mary Ruefle. Full of the peculiarity and wit characteristic of Ruefle’s work, the poems deliver an imaginative take on the world’s rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness. The questions that we encounter in the little red Ruefle schoolhouse are not “questions left howling  / because their owner has died” — we are made to own them, to pick up the message in the long relay. It is to us that the questions and the quest are put. We emerge from these poems, scathed and awakened. Christina Davis, Poetry MagazineAs a verbal hunter-gatherer, Ruefle is a barometer of our lyric listening. Her poems are sieves of consciousness, catching strangeness and mundanity, the overheard and the under the breath...Ruefle reminds us how odd, synthetic, and arduous it is—the pursuit of this transmission of verbal fact and fo