The Book

In the prose-poem “Pixie,” from Mary Ruefle’s The Book, the speaker recalls her first haircut, on what she “might now call the Day of the Great Shorning,” when she was “caped like a princess and set on a throne” that “turned like a planet.” Sitting on her throne, the child marveled at the bottles of potions, fixating on one with a “comb suspended in it like a shark in the aquarium,” which she fantasized about taking home:

it would look nice in my room, I was so intent on taking it home (I would have to buy fish food), I didn’t hear the scissors, I didn’t hear my own hair falling from off my head

This child—who, when the planet turned again, found herself “looking in the mirror at the face of a stranger, a hairless pixie with the ears of an elf”—is now unrecognizable to the adult speaker whose hair is “like a bridal train” that “wraps me like an octopus when I bathe.”

Ruefle’s poems gather clues and sensations to construct the past—the gaps are closed with a vivid imagination. The speaker in “Dear Friends” recalls her friend peeling an orange in public for the first time, having been barred from doing so by her mother, who believed “that to peel an orange—or any other fruit—in the presence of another person was perverse; you might as well undress in front of them”:

she took off the skin […] revealing the flesh inside, which was sometimes translucent and bright and bursting with moisture, and at other times covered by a thin white cottony undergarment.

When reminded of these events, the friend says that she never eats oranges, and has no memory of the picnic.

If this book is about recollection, and a meditation on the inevitable passing of all things, it is also about errors, cracks in our recall that switch the familiar world for one that is slightly strange. Ruefle writes about the fluctuating intensity of friendships, missed connections, and affections sent out into the world that bounce right back: “She kept calling, I didn’t pick up, and finally she stopped. I think she understood I was somehow not the same.”