RaveFull StopThe voices in My Private Property — with essays, prose poems, and pieces in between — are often unstable without much tension, or stable yet quite tense. And this collection’s sensations are marvelous small hoof kicks all over … The book’s insistent attempts to use voice to take and hold onto an experience are a colorless, tormented sadness below the surface of this funny, colorful collection. Further, Ruefle’s self-reflexive awareness of the equally insistent failure to possess such experience feels climactic — or anti-climactic — in ‘Self-Criticism’ toward the end of the book.
