Lit Hub Blurs the Line Between Poetry & Essay

At Literary Hub today, Ruby Brunton writes: "There is a long-standing tradition of poets who have refused genre, or reinvented it, and who continue to push the boundaries of form." Indeed! Brunton presents five writers who blur, bend, and erase the boundary between poetry and the essay: Jenny Boully, Dodie Bellamy, Claudia Rankine, David Rattray, and Maggie Nelson. We'll take a look into what Brunton writes about Boully and leave it up to you to head to Lit Hub to read up on the other four: 

The first essay in Jenny Boully’s latest collection Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, published last month, is a journey into two illusive linguistic temporalities: “the future imagined and the past imagined.” By positioning the reader in a space of hypothesis, Boully tests the limits of memory and lived experience, never quite allowing her reader to land on stable footing. With this linguistic trick, a redefinition of what is the personal begins to emerge.

Throughout her work, Boully is interested in reorienting the role of the reader from passive to participatory and reorienting the structure of the text from chronological to sensory. In an introduction to Boully’s work, Mary Jo Bang writes, “She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with poetry.” It’s no wonder that excerpts from her first book The Body, written as footnotes to an imaginary text, were included in both John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002.