Posts Tagged ‘Jenny Boully’

Atlanta: The Return of Coconut

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

 

Atlanta’s Coconut Books and Coconut Magazine are back in full effect. Publisher and founding editor Bruce Covey is now accepting submissions for the magazine, one of the first web-based literary journals. Covey has brought on board Gina Myers, Kim Gek Lin Short, Danielle Pafunda, and Laura Solomon as editors. They hope to launch the first new issue this summer.

Coconut Books will offer eight new titles in 2012. Four titles currently available are Molly Brodak’s chapbook The Flood and the following full-length collections–how to survive a hotel fire by Angela Veronica Wong, Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski, and Covey’s Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes, which Coconut is distributing for Bitter Cherry Books. Collections coming in October are: Slope Move by Hanna Andrews, I Am Going to Save Your Life by Christie Ann Reynolds, Like Likeness Renders by Emily Toder, and a new collection by Jenny Boully. In 2013, Coconut Books plans to publish new full-length titles by Serena Chopra, Amber Nelson, Gina Myers, plus their book contest winners and an anthology. They hope to publish one or two more titles, but those are currently top secret. SPD will stock all of the new titles, plus backlist titles by Gina Myers, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Natalie Lyalin, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Look out for these by the end of June.

Finally, Coconut Books is sponsoring two new book prizes. The Joanna Cargill Coconut Book Prize for a First Book and The Elizabeth P. Braddock Coconut Book Prize (open to any poet with one or more previously published full-length collection). The deadline for both contests is June 30, 2012 before 6 PM EST. Covey and crew are not charging reading fees. Winners receive 25 copies of the finished book and 50% of all net profits (i.e., dollars earned by the press above total production, editorial, and marketing costs) earned by the book. Visit Coconut on Facebook for the full guidelines.

–Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2011
Reviewed by Kate Angus

“The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

The best folk tales and children’s stories are the dark ones, the ones that hint at the world and human relations as they really are and so continue to haunt our adult dreams, shocking us awake to reel at the true terrors of abandonment, our inevitable decay, heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. The act of parsing out and presenting these adult truths from beneath the veils of children’s fantasy is the project at the heart of Jenny Boully’s masterful new book, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. The book is a brilliant alternate version of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s book Peter and Wendy. Boully adjusts the focus so that Peter Pan is, as his name has come to signify, the type of boy who won’t grow up or settle down, who will seduce and then soon replace you, who’ll forget you in the blink of an eye even as you pine for him and wither with age, who will flitter on to the next replacement Mother to bring home for a while as a briefly-loved plaything as he amuses himself on his island of Lost Boys.

The book is constructed to hold two narratives: the original story of Peter Pan and Wendy that Boully assumes the reader knows, and her own variations. Structurally, she tells us these stories through two prose texts, one sitting on top of the other. The top half of each page holds the longer larger narrative while beneath, separated by a line and entitled The Home Under Ground, she gives us smaller fragmentary moments, shards of stunning images and commentary that serve as both literal and figurative subtext to the story above. When, for example, the top narrative tells us:

He will come to you in the darkest part of the night when you are sleeping…Despite his ability to lose so much, despite his boyish looks, his boyish charms, he can only dress himself with skeletons, with skeleton leaves; he smells of and is made of the loam of decaying roots and branches, the rotting sap and juices of Neverland trees. And what are these? What are these? asks Mrs. Darling, who knows that these leaves, these leaves littering the nursery floor, these leaves, aren’t the leaves of earthbound trees.

The Home Underground section whispers an even darker story, asking:

Would the death boat be made of the feathers of the Never bird? Enclose her within the rib bones of swallows….That gleaming in his eyes isn’t a personal excitement; if ever, if ever I forget you, then.

Tarpaulin Sky Press is listing not merely as Fiction / Poetry and that seems about right. Much like Boully’s previous books (The Body unfolds only as footnotes, [one love affair]* is a chimera of fiction, essay, prose poetry and memoir, and The Book of Beginnings and Endings, is comprised entirely of narrative openings and closings), it exists in the hybrid ground where it is both, either or neither, as the story within is both a children’s story and an analysis of a too common trope in adult relationships, and where Peter is both Peter and the “Betwixt-and-Between” that Boully dubs him.

In both texts, the narrative voice speaks in urgent fragment tones directly to Wendy, explaining the significance of small details and clips of dialogue and telling her story to her both as it happens and as it will happen in the future:

The window hasn’t been left open, and there is another boy sleeping in your bed. The absence of the beloved, the replacement that is easily replaced by Peter’s mother is also easily replaced by Peter himself, who will forget you, who will forget to love you or even to know you

Boully’s voice is hypnotic as she weaves half-remembered source-text stories with newer interpretations and builds a forward rush that detonates as she deploys a sudden fragmentation: for instance, the unexpected “let’s play pretend that I save you right before. We drown.”

Peter’s abandonment of Wendy seems inevitable throughout. This is due in part to his own fickle natue: “I’m a little bird, he says. But he doesn’t say that to just you alone.” It is also due to Wendy’s intensifying abandonment of immaturity, and to the simple fact of the inevitable decay that awaits all of us, particularly Wendy, the lone girl still attached to the human world during her sojourn in Never Land: “We won’t notice that we’ve grown until we’ve grown: that’s Wendy’s predicament.” All of these play out sexually as well; Peter has numerous other dalliances, and an air of darkness and complication permeates Wendy’s exchanges with the menacing, powerful Hook. “Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe,” the narrative voice advises Wendy, and later, half-mockingly reassures her that “If this…storyteller isn’t quite right, why then, another…will shortly come. It’s been known to happen.”

Boully maintains a fluid text but shies away from straightforward narration, providing a modern re-envisioning of a cultural touchstone that is also a commentary on itself. She weaves a gorgeous fever-dream where our half-remembered childhood stories now stand revealed as adult archetypes. Time itself becomes unstuck, as even Peter and the Lost Boys begin to contemplate “how we can continue on here without having to reinvent too much. Or, better yet, let’s…ascertain just what has transpired so that we can make it all new again.”  This moment seems like an embedded ars poetica, as the book itself also continually makes itself new and reinvents its source texts. The text warns Wendy continually that Peter will tire of her, will forget her, will leave her, yet an “I” suddenly speaks near the end, saying “You see, Peter, I too, alone, without you, can have adventures….I can leave you.” The idea of who has left who is suddenly open to new interpretation–was it Peter’s waywardness or Wendy’s ability to mature (something Peter lacks) that is the greater and decisive abandonment? After all, it is Wendy who has controlled the narrative–both by being the cause (the “you” the book speaks to so urgently) and by being identified as a storyteller throughout. At the end, it is Wendy who controls language and meaning, saying to Peter, “My dear, my dear pet wolf: I will tell you the difference between A and Z,” as well as the narrative of passing time, as she is the echo of “the housewife who has grown, has grown, the home is nothing but a hole. The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

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[one love affair]*

Monday, August 7th, 2006

by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

8

What There Is 1

boully coverIf you’re wondering about the brackets and asterisk in the book’s title, I can at least tell you this: if you’re a guy reading on the subway, [one love affair]* makes you feel a little tougher than One Love Affair would. The front cover, which includes a picture of a burnt out crack pipe, works to the same end.

Of course both titles might suggest a story of jilted love and love affairs, of someone weaving through relationships and appreciating the best of each partner before an unraveling—in a sense, the every-person story we’ve heard time and again. In [one love affair]*, a genre-bending back-pocket book that the publisher calls an “extended prose poem,” Boully’s discovered a way to make this story work again. Instead of bogging us down with whining and details, Boully offers inventive, associative nuggets that fuse a reader with the complex and confusing range of emotions everyone gets stuck with in the village of love and plunder. [one love affair]* is gritty and intellectual, it’s addictive and soothing, and it’s fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf. If her mesh of simple language and brainiac posturing don’t hit you, her sentiments probably will.

There are a million stories of love gone wrong, and they all have the same bottom line. Boully accounts for this by giving little weight to the specifics of her narrator’s story—“I keep leaving out what happened, what really happened towards the end”—so however traditional the emotions are, we’re reminded here that someone new deals with them every day. By the end, you’re grateful for the details she does offer, and you’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time. The asterisk in the title points to a small paragraph (included on the title page) that offers some of these details. It becomes the reader’s job to place them while reading the text:

A million wallowing anemones, a thousand eyes peeping through, a thousand spies shivering, unnameable endless flowerings, countless empty bottles, twelve flowers, eleven trees, eight fruits, four vegetables, four peppers, two enemas, two kidnappings, one accident, one suicide, one soothsayer, one drowning, one nightclub called Juicy.

[one love affair]* also has very much to do with the act of reading and the ability language has to apprehend, if for an instant, an airy sense of otherness. Boully’s first book, The Body: An Essay (scoop it up if you see it, it’s a tough find these days), was constructed entirely of footnotes, to no related text. In [one love affair]*, the footnote is again her weapon of choice. Her first footnote explains her intentions: “[one love affair]* is meant to illustrate how, when reading, our minds often supply another narrative. This book is thus the narrative that snuck in when reading various books, which are documented in subsequent footnotes.” The result is a psychic map that helps the reader live such a story on an emotional level—something like virtual reality, fragment by fragment. Boully knows that anyone reading her book is likely creating their own “narrative,” so again, she’s made her narrator’s story the every-person story. Plot is second to sensation, and the reader fills in the blanks with both Boully’s hints and their own associative wanderings of the mind (though methinks there’s plot enough here to satisfy the fiction crowd).

She wends a story of broken relationships, deploying everything from mimosa trees and spring to nightclubs and crack-smoke. The creep of nostalgia is there from the beginning; in the book’s opening, we appear to have caught the narrator mid-thought:

She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his
former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring
which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning
again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way that Chaucer’s
spring would never do.

In a footnote to this sentence, the reader learns Boully has mimicked the syntax of a sentence by Robert Belaño: “…watching clouds crumble, break apart and scatter in the Chilean sky, as Baudelaire’s clouds would never do.” So, her thoughts are a subtext to Belaño’s, and your thoughts as you read are a subtext to Boully’s. Sort of. As the book progresses, the narrator is defined as much by her dreams as she is by her waking life. Whatever brainstorming she did about footnotes when constructing the final version of The Body pays off big time in [one love affair]* ; a richness and density is added to her soft language. The wandering, cathartic romanticism is sometimes Virginia Woolf and sometimes Anne Carson’s Glass Essay, but in the end it’s all Boully.

Another distinguishing trick is repetition. Sentences, like the narrator’s lovers, come and go, they change forms, they leave you sometimes surprised and sometimes disappointed to see they’ve returned or that you returned to them. In the book’s third section, titled “There is Scarcely More than There Is,” the narrator becomes involved with a female lover. Over the course of the book, Boully frequently splices random (symbolic?) imagery with her narrative:

In the bowl filled with water, the green beans floated on the surface,
as if they had never been loved by the bottom of anything. I did not
think she would last long.  She said she needed cats because cats would
love her back, and they would love her unconditionally. I did not think
she would last long; she was already twenty-two and wrinkling and taken
to hard labor in rural Blue Ridge weather.

In the subsequent paragraph, the narrator uses a well-honed sense for repetition and recycles the notion that that this new lover wouldn’t last: “She said she had given me everything, excepting fidelity; she asked why couldn’t I love without there being acts of love? She would not last long, I knew.”

The narrator in [one love affair]* constantly struggles between inadequate lovers (one guy takes her to a party “where everyone was covered with bruises, so decrepit were they on crack”) and a lack of ability or desire to stick with any one person. She concludes that when relationships unravel, it’s really beyond reason, and what’s left is how amazing the relationship was at the start. Here, the “main character” is referred to from the third- rather than first-person perspective: “In a last correspondence, she posed a question which he never answered. In last correspondences, never so much about what it was that really did happen in the end, in the very end. There is instead so much talk about beginnings.”

The third section’s title, “There Is Scarcely More Than There Is,” is borrowed from Gertrude Stein, and does well to explain Boully’s obsession with footnotes. Some might say that to put words on paper is to mark “something.” To footnote any of those words, then, is to imply “other”—the “more than there is.” If Boully’s first book is regarded as an army of footnotes to the ineffable, it should be noted that it was originally published in Seneca Review as a lyric essay. They were transformed later, and perhaps she was still fleshing out the idea. In [one love affair]* the narrative, often borrowed and transformed into a map of the psyche, dictates its own footnotes. Her work is better for the shift, and better in general; that’s to say, Boully has delivered after a promising debut and carved out her niche in American poetry.

Her new book, like her first, embodies the split between what’s here and what’s there, borrowing its sentences from everywhere and situating the work in a modernist nothing that bleeds an attempt to balance it all, both intellectually and emotionally. Beginnings and endings in the midst of an impossible otherness are vital (the prolific Boully’s third book, Book of Beginnings and Endings, is due out next year from Sarabande). Despite its density, [one love affair]* speaks to human nature on its most basic level. The implication of “other”—which supersedes any partner as an object to be feared and obsessed over—results in an obsessive need for urgency, an attempt to access the “more” from yourself and from others while knowing you’ll wind up right back where you started.

___________

1More Than There Is

*

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