The way she uses language, not at the tip of the sensible but one rung of abstraction above it, lets her paint whole worlds for you to daydream in. ( )

Dunce is a playful collection with poems that have a dexterity of images, albeit sometimes bizarre. Read during the quarantine and pandemic of 2020, Ruefle's keen wit was a welcome companion. More than anything it was the tone that stood out, and a keen sense of longing to get out from under intellectualization, or maybe that's simply what I wanted to find.