Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow

arrived today. I love it. It's a tiny little book smaller than a loaf of bread.

It's her celebrated book which is mostly White-Out with tiny glimpses of text allowed to show through. It's rather as though you've had eye surgery and have been wrapped in layers and layers of gauze like a character in the old movies and you're only able to see little bits of the world through your scrim as it's being unwrapped.

It's from WAVE BOOKS, one of the best poetry publishers in the country. They prove that again and again with books like these.

The book really has the Burning Deck sensibility. I could have seen Keith & Rosmarie publishing this book (another of those great poetry publishers).

I don't know how I managed to miss this book for so long.

I have some pages Mary sent me some time back from some of her earlier books where she had begun this process, and whited-out to find sparer poems within her own poems.

But those pages don't figure in here.

This book is as much a piece of short fiction as it is a poem...possibly more fiction than poetry.

And the oddest thing is that it reminds me of Edward Gorey (of whom Ruefle rarely reminds me otherwise).

But there's a Gorey dark humor here in the story of a soul that never got to emerge, effloresce, tell its stories, but instead came to us as a few fragments of beleagured existence.

Welcome to the Erasure Dome.

It's nice.

Pick it up if you love odd, gorgeous, insoluble little books.