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A review by miffybooks
My Private Property by Mary Ruefle
4.0
this is some of the most remarkable prose ive ever read! ruefle has such an exhausted outlook on everything but shares everything in such a calm tone that all the super defeatist existential pieces dont actually feel scary. she also has such an amazing mind for imagery, theres so many beautiful lines that i was constantly underlining.
she has such a unique kind of rambling structure that works SO well in the shorter pieces (the ones that are 3 pages or less) but sometimes i felt the themes slipping away from me bcs of it in the longer pieces. the way she contrasts this rambling way of writing is by ending nearly every poem with powerful, succinct endings that somehow always manage to wrap everything together, no matter how disorganized it seems. this is most present in my absolute favorite piece (and probably my current favorite piece of writing) "lullaby" which is just 3 brilliant pages that lull you into calmness perfectly setting up an incredible final line that just smacks you awake.
also, i cant talk about this book without mentioning the color pieces! these are a few short pieces throughout the book that characterize sadness through different colors. these pieces are written a lot more poetically than everything else in the book, and i absolutely adored them. they are all so image heavy and i found myself so vividly seeing everything she wrote in these pieces but completely washed in a light of the color she was describing. it was a really visual experience that i dont often find in books.
if goodreads let me do half stars, id give this a 4.5 out of 5. really fantastic book that i spent too much money on and do not regret at all.
she has such a unique kind of rambling structure that works SO well in the shorter pieces (the ones that are 3 pages or less) but sometimes i felt the themes slipping away from me bcs of it in the longer pieces. the way she contrasts this rambling way of writing is by ending nearly every poem with powerful, succinct endings that somehow always manage to wrap everything together, no matter how disorganized it seems. this is most present in my absolute favorite piece (and probably my current favorite piece of writing) "lullaby" which is just 3 brilliant pages that lull you into calmness perfectly setting up an incredible final line that just smacks you awake.
also, i cant talk about this book without mentioning the color pieces! these are a few short pieces throughout the book that characterize sadness through different colors. these pieces are written a lot more poetically than everything else in the book, and i absolutely adored them. they are all so image heavy and i found myself so vividly seeing everything she wrote in these pieces but completely washed in a light of the color she was describing. it was a really visual experience that i dont often find in books.
if goodreads let me do half stars, id give this a 4.5 out of 5. really fantastic book that i spent too much money on and do not regret at all.