In Golden Crumbs, Mary Ruefle, a master of the absurd aphorism and philosophical curio, shows us ancient anchovies, poets aspiring to be birds, a cryalogue, powdered glass for dinner, friends who don’t read your poems, lovers, big houses, blue houses, big mountains and more, in a voice that is irreverent, philosophical, inimitable: world-making and world-breaking. The kinship between people, animals and landscapes is lightly, thoughtfully, crisply rendered, with emotional depths that she drops through, with ease, like a penny in a well. These texts are fun, funny, moving, melancholic and full of games, Ruefle’s voice and style enacting a playful magic that allows us to query art and ourselves in equal measure. Bringing together for the first time three of Mary Ruefle’s collections of prose – The Most of It, My Private Property and The Book – Golden Crumbs is a first UK publication for one of America’s greatest living poets and essayists.
Golden Crumbs
French paperback with flaps, 264 pages
Published 8 October 2026
Golden Crumbs
SNOW
Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex. No matter if it is snowing lightly and unseriously, or snowing very seriously, well on into the night, I would like to stop whatever manifestation of life I am engaged in and have sex, with the same person, who also sees the snow and heeds it, who might have to leave an office or meeting, or some arduous physical task, or, conceivably, leave off having sex with another person, and go in the snow to me, who is already, in the snow, beginning to have sex in my snow-mind. Someone for whom, like me, this is an ultimatum, the snow sign, an ultimatum of joy, though as an ultimatum beyond joy as well as sorrow. I would like to be in the classroom—for I am a teacher—and closing my book stand up, saying “It is snowing and I must go have sex, goodbye,” and walk out of the room. And starting my car, in the beginning stages of snow, know that he is starting his car, with the flakes falling on its windshield, or, if he is at home, he is looking at the snow and knowing I will arrive, snowy, in ten or twenty or thirty minutes, and, if the snow has stopped off, we, as humans, can make a decision, but not while it is still snowing, and even half-snow would be something to be obeyed. I often wonder where the birds go in a snowstorm, for they disappear completely. I always think of them deep inside the bushes, and further along inside the trees and deep inside of the forests, on branches where no snow can reach, deeply recessed for the time of the snow, not oblivious to it, but intensely accepting their incapacity, and so enduring the snow in brave little inborn ways, with their feathered heads bowed down for warmth. Wings, the mark of a bird, are quite useless in snow. When I am inside having sex while it snows I want to be thinking about the birds too, and I want my love to love thinking about the birds as much as I do, for it is snowing and we are having sex under or on top of the blankets and the birds cannot be that far away, deep in the stillness and silence of the snow, their breasts still have color, their hearts are beating, they breathe in and out while it snows all around them, though thinking about the birds is not as fascinating as watching it snow on a cemetery, on graves and tombstones and the vaults of the dead, I love watching it snow on graves, how cold the snow is, even colder the stones, and the ground is the coldest of all, and the bones of the dead are in the ground, but the dead are not cold, snow or no snow, it means very little to them, nothing, it means nothing to them, but for us, watching it snow on the dead, watching the graveyard get covered in snow, it is very cold, the snow on top of the graves over the bones, it seems especially cold, and at the same time especially peaceful, it is like snow falling gently on sleepers, even if it falls in a hurry it seems gentle, because the sleepers are gentle, they are not anxious, they are sleeping through the snow and they will be sleeping beyond the snow, and although I will be having sex while it snows I want to remember the quiet, cold, gentle sleepers who cannot think of themselves as birds nestled in feathers, but who are themselves, in part, part of the snow, which is falling with such steadfast devotion to the ground all the anxiety in the world seems gone, the world seems deep in a bed as I am deep in a bed, lost in the arms of my lover, yes, when it snows like this I feel the whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.
‘Mary Ruefle is the kind of poet who can make Tupperware seem transcendent… [t]he charm of her poems is perhaps their most palpable quality. She can nonchalantly finish a poem with the words “bye-bye”, as though that were the way all poems secretly end. She is a poet about whom fans say things like: “Somehow Mary Ruefle has nuzzled her way into my heart, soul, mind.” And: “I love you. Where have you always been? Will you stay?”’
— Emily Berry, author of Unexhausted Time
‘The Book explores the bittersweetness of getting older…. In a whirlwind of people and places, Vermont’s solitude-loving poet laureate paints a pictured of a life lived in the company of many others.’
— Los Angeles Review of Books
‘The potent pieces resist easy interpretation, sparkling with the suggestiveness of Ruefle’s poetry. Readers will marvel at the results.’
— Publishers Weekly
‘Ruefle has excelled in writing agile, syncopated free verse, but her prose poems are even more unusual. Her investigations in the genre have yielded a sound all her own. You hear in these new poems how poetic prose can absorb and parody the regular prose of daily life: articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, legal documents, business correspondence.’
— Jim Schley, author of As When, In Season
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book, Dunce, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, My Private Property, Trances of the Blast, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Robert Creeley 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. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she was poet laureate from 2019–2024.
