Trances of the Blast

"We emerge from these poems, scathed and awakened."—Poetry

"An excellent choice for any collection looking to expand poetry beyond the obvious."—Library Journal, starred review

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 her imaginative take on the world's rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us to better appreciate its redeeming strangeness.

From "Goodnight Irene":

I think the tree is very much turned on
I can feel its sticky sap rising in my eyes
Its sticky sap is in my eyes
I do not think the tree wishes it were dead
I think the baby is very much turned on
Look baby a birdie in the tree
Say bye-bye birdie now go out and get a job
My job is writing poems and reading them to a cloud

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams 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. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was named a finalist for the National Books Critic Circle award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

Mary Ruefle is the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and include the publication of A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.