Elisa Gabbert Reviews Mary Ruefle's 'Death-Haunted' Dunce for the NYT

In a new book review at the NYT, Elisa Gabbert observes the ways that Mary Ruefle's latest collection, Dunce (Wave, 2019), "confronts the extraordinary yet banal fact that all of us die. How do we reconcile the boringness of death-in-general with the shock of our own, specific death?" More: 

Our own deaths, though certain, do not seem possible perhaps until our parents die — as though this were the true end of childhood, and so the end of youth. The presence of an older generation is a comfort, a weighted blanket, that makes us feel protected; its absence creates the inexorable sense that we’re next. Ruefle’s mother’s death haunts this collection — it feels as if her death itself is the ghost, the event and not the person. Take the poem “Bath Time”:

and a light rain

falling on my mother’s grave

comes back to me,

how it seemed

on that sans-everything day

to be the very pins

she carried in her mouth

We learn from “I Remember, I Remember,” Ruefle’s essay-lecture in the style of Joe Brainard, that she was 45 when her mother died, and “it poured the day we buried her.” All rain now is funeral rain. In the poem “Lightly, Very Lightly”: “It was raining. / I could hear the rain / taking the pins out of her mouth.” In “Little Travel Book,” a black car rolls backward out of a garage: “This is sad, like Stonehenge in the rain.” In “Halloween,” a fake corpse with a motion detector “sat up,” “its eyes rolled back to white,” and “turned its head around, / all the way around,” when you approached it. This, Ruefle writes, “reminded me of my mother / and at the thought of my mother / there was a corpse in me.” These references register as a pain in my chest (my own mother has begun to complain of chest pain).

Continue reading at the New York Times.