Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Over the course of 15 years, award-winning poet Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures articulate the wisdom accrued through a life dedicated entirely to poetry. Intellectually virtuosic, instructive and experiential, MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion.

For every time I read a poem I am willing to die...

Author City: BENNINGTON, VT USA

Mary Ruefle is the author of the essay collection MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY: COLLECTED LECTURES (Wave Books, 2012), ten books of poetry, a book of prose (THE MOST OF IT, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book (Go Home and Go to Bed, Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A LITTLE WHITE SHADOW (Wave Books, 2006). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the 2011 Wiliam Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

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