Apparition Hill

Mary Ruefle is an observer who seeks to bring sense and order to her world. This is a world that can span continents and centuries, but in each. the poem is defined by where she is at that moment. Many of the poems in Apparition Hill were written in or about China, and Ruefle brings an eye for the universal to what she finds in the exotic, as she transcends both time and geography.

Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter.
— Tony Hoagland

Apparition Hill . . . dates from a 1989 sojourn teaching in China . . . These jolly poems about disappointment, irrelevance, and peripheral experiences give the willing reader a feeling not unlike that delivered by a tumbler of armagnac . . . If hers is sometimes a literary, knowing poetry, she gives it bite. In “Diary of Action and Repose,” she destabilizes an already nonstandard nature scene (bullfrogs inflate in “some small sub-station of the universe,” the speaker can smell jasmine being fertilized, that is, and an unseen flute player isn’t setting a contemplative mood, but rather “asserts his identity / in a very sweet way”) with the quip, “I’ll throw in the fact it’s April in China,” . . . Ultimately, this is a poetry that craves, pursues, and secures the extra—the roux, the crema, the patina—that indicates the presence of beauty . . .
— Jordan Davis, The Constant Critic

August 2002
70 pp
Trade paper – 6 x 9.50
$14
ISBN 978-0-9678856-6-3