The pages of “A Little White Shadow,” by Mary Ruefle, house a lyric “I” — the ghost voice that emerges so often from what we call a poem. Yet the I belonged first to another book, a Christian text of the same name published in 1890, by Emily Malbone Morgan. On another page, we read (can I say Ruefle writes? This method of finding an I out there, already typed, to identify with, seems to me not much different from typing an I. An I on the page is abstract, symbolic, and not the same I as in speech, which in itself is not the same I as the I in the mind.

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Persons: Mary Ruefle, Emily Malbone Morgan, Ruefle “, Ruefle