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 The Book, Dunce, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, My Private Property, Trances of the Blast, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is the recipient of numerous honours, 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 was poet laureate from 2019–2024.