Neither poetry nor prose, but owing to both – with a dollop of essay, creative non-fiction and memoir - The Body is a surprising, complex study of self-discovery and memory. At the same time we're led through the speaker's encounters with "ethereal ponderings occurring in some heaven or other" and "the scenery…to where her death boat drifted," the book also re-examines the narrative form by completely casting it aside – The Body is composed entirely of a series of alternately dreamy, dark and humorous footnotes to a non-existent text.

The Body: An Essay

Literature & Fiction

Boully, Jenny

Poetry

Slope Editions

Poetry. [ONE LOVE AFFAIR]* meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much as study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion. As with Jenny Boully's debut book THE BODY (2002), [ONE LOVE AFFAIR]* is full of gaps and fissures and "seduces its reader by drawing unexpected but felicitous linkages between disparate citations from the history of literature," a work that is "filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination" --Christian Bok. Told through fragments that accrete through uncertain meanings, romanticized memories, and fleeting moments rather than clear narrative or linear time Boully explores the spaces between too much and barely enough, fecundity and decay, the sublime and the disgusting, wholeness and emptiness, love and loneliness in a world where life can be interpreted as a series of love affairs that are "unwilling to complete."

[one love affair]*

Contemporary

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Essays. Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text, THE BODY: AN ESSAY is a meditation on absence, loss and disappearance that offers a guarded "narrative" of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise on the relation of life to book. Christian Bok describes Boully's groundbreaking text as one that "may simply annotate a fantastic biography from another reality, referring only to itself as a kind of dream within a dream...The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void-filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination." First published in 2002 and excerpted in such anthologies as The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002, THE BODY: AN ESSAY continues to challenge conventional notions of plot and narrative, genre and form, theory and practice, unremittingly questioning the presumptive boundaries between reflection, imagination, and experience.

Essays & Correspondence

Essay Press

Fiction. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARD THEM is a dark re-visioning of J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy―as only Jenny Boully could have written.

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.” ―John D’Agata
“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.” ―Mary Jo Bang
“Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer―in the best way.” ―Ander Monson
Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.
Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Coffee House Press

“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata
“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo Bang
A book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection.
 Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essayand [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.

The Book of Beginnings and Endings

United States

Sarabande Books

Poetry. "I've never come across a book with the conceit of Boully's latest, which explicitly presents 'poetic failures,'—'embarrassments, short-comings, and all'—written over the course of many years, mostly in thrall to the existential condition she aptly terms 'pining.' Her conclusion, which comes after waves of diverse poetic experiments have crashed and receded, is that 'nothing written will bring love.' It is a wise and unusual finding in a book filled with delicacy and resilience."—Maggie Nelson "The speaker in these poems has been listening to our thoughts for years and transforming them into this book, which chronicles failures and their manifestations—the shiny things, the ephemera of what could have been. Jenny Boully is one of my favorite writers because of how much care she takes with language and with truth. This stunning collection highlights her incredible range as a poet. It is a breathtaking addition to her body of work."—Carmen Giménez Smith "The imagery of Jenny Boully's OF THE MISMATCHED TEACUPS, OF THE SINGLE-SERVING SPOON lurks somewhere in the filmic senses among Buñuel and Brakhage, mashing the natural and the metaphysical and the dreamed-of and the remembered-without-why. 'Night is urgent,' she writes amidst a text packed tight with bodies waiting among messed up road maps, waiting to be found, touched, loved. Later: 'I like to blame all of this on the time of year.' When the nausea meds and mushrooms and beers are not enough, these poems are nice and bright like knives, some shells to fit over your face and breathe with."—Blake Butler

of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures

Coconut Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boully, Jenny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Boully, Jenny

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boully, Jenny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Body: An Essay

[one love affair]*

The Body: An Essay

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

The Book of Beginnings and Endings

of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures