On Imagination

"Through her unique blend of anecdotes and meditations upon subjects ranging from John Keats to Jesus to the Ukrainian art of Easter egg dyeing, Ruefle manages to demonstrate that the act of writing is much more than the solitary task it can sometimes feel like—it is a collaboration between yourself and the world."

—Poets & Writers, "Best Books for Writers"



“[She is] a poet of visionary imagination, abiding sensitivity, and melancholy humor.”

—Publishers Weekly



“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.... She is not writing with a prescription, or at least not one for this earth.”

—The New York Times



“No writer...comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates the odd mystery and mysticism of the act—the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back.... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle’s work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that’s vital and welcome, that doesn’t make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun.”

—Kenyon Review



“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



“Ruefle is the Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas — surreal and lyrical and deeply moving at the same time.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books



“Ruefle’s speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us.”

—Ploughshares



“As 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 form. If you want to know how an early 21st-century lyric poem gets made, and how it is tethered to the rhetorics and resources of its time and place, start here.”

—Boston Review



“Mary Ruefle is, in this humble bookseller’s opinion, the best prose-writing poet in America.”

—Literary Hub



"[I] tore through [On Imagination] in a single sitting – during which I took notes, underlined generously, and paused to marvel at how her written experiences were so spot on. . . . I strongly advise teaching this essay if that’s your profession."

—Hyype, "use your noodle: On Imagination"



“For more than thirty years, [Mary Ruefle] has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience.”

—Poetry Society of America



“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



"Thank goodness for Mary Ruefle, who continues to produce strange, perfectly unexpected sentences like, 'I don’t like artificial flowers, but when they look real I fall in love with them,' and 'Artists are just people who have not forgotten how to draw.' A delightful, restless exploration of the meaning of imagination, complete with goats, pie, and Wittgenstein."

—Harvard Book Store