Ruin is a tale that is not a tale. It is a microscopic peering into the unpleasant fabric of human sustainability. It is a real person wrought by sabotaging the very nature of storytelling. It is a description of love, that is, the deliberate perversion of it in order to fulfill one's needs, which is to say it is the banal record of everyday life. It is a collection of details that follow the details that preceded it in A Book of Nightmares. It is not a happy book. It is full of elegiac contemplation on suffering, helplessness, holiness and unrelenting sexual isolation. It is blunt and graphic and painfully beautiful. It has little plot, and no punctuation, and might, just might, be the poetry for which America has been unconsciously waiting....

there is only love in its various forms and manifestations and by it we either see or we do not see it has been eight years since my last report I am home again if this house can be said to have been a home to me or rather if it can still so be called many years have scampered in and eaten away at what I remember was a modest structure with a mild economical luster ......

Epigraph Ruin About the Author About William Ralph Press