Works by
Jenny Boully
(Writer)
[1976 - ]

Essays

• Moveable Types (2007)

• The Book of Beginnings and Endings (2007)
  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.

• The Body: An Essay (2002,2007)
  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.  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.

Fiction

• [one love affair]*: A million wallowing anemones, a thousand eyes peeping through, a thousand spies shivering, unnamable endless flowerings, countless empty ... one drowning, one nightclub called Juicy. (2006)
  [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 a 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 ... Told through fragments that accrete through uncertain meanings, romanticized memories, and fleeting moments rather than clear narrative or linear time, [one love affair]* 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."