This poetry, balanced with music, demonstrates a mastery of prosody that deepens the pleasures of the page instead of interfering with them. The poems are self-reflexive, musical, referential, educated, and passionate. Phillips layers references from literature, myth, and history. Other poems convey the exploratory capacities of open-field form. In all the poems there is a sense of exacting lyric freshness.
Lines seem cut and trimmed, composed of syntactic arrangements and reversals.
Unusual gaps in syntax, parenthetical suspensions, and juxtapositions convey evasive meanings that are complex and circular. Sometimes Ruefle and Dean Young recall one another. Her poems stare into a great crevasse, unwilling to flinch or move toward safety. In Ruefle's worlds, hilarity and deep sorrow lie very comfortably together, and the humor offsets at least some of the despair, as does the tightly controlled language. These poems do not provide relief, but their inclusion is a humanizing gesture that adds further richness to a very rich book.