La Boully

I’ve been making extensive cross-country flights this past month, from NYC to Seattle, from NYC to San Francisco (twice), and from NYC to Ontario, California on my way to the U.S.-México border, and each time I carried a book on board to keep me grounded (pun intended) during these lengthy, gravity-defying plane rides. Well, on one occasion, I had a copy of Jenny Boully’s new book of essays under my arm and as I made my way down the aisle a woman sitting in an exit row leaned over and asked, “Is that a poetry book?”

How could I fault her for this question? The book is as slim as a standard poetry volume (57 pages to be exact), it’s got its artsy cover (I remember seeing the actual piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years back), and then that intriguing title, The Book of Beginnings and Endings.
In a previous post, a few of us bloggers gushed over Jenny Boully’s work, so I was anxious to read and mention her work here again, mostly because her art defies easy categorization and challenges readers to construct narrative in the absence of narrative (as was the case with The Body: An Essay, a book made up entirely of footnotes) or rather, she asks us to reposition ourselves in relation to language and to reconsider how this interaction instructs/constructs meaning.
Boully is a conceptual poet, and this new book is composed of two-page narratives that include the opening and closing paragraphs of longer narratives—a critical thesis, a manifesto, an exploratory essay, a scientific study, among many other genres covering a vast spectrum of subjects—which may or may not exist. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the writer collapses the space between A and Z, between Alpha and Omega, between Prologue and Epilogue, the reader must converse with the impression of ideas, with the ellipses in articulation, with implied meaning. Boully trains us to approach these narratives much like we encounter lyrical poems. Hence why Boully opens the book with a quote from Kenk