Customer Reviews

The Body: An Essay

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One time, I was watching The X-Files, and Mulder told Scully that dreams were answers to questions we haven't yet learned how to ask. I've read through Jenny Boully's 2002 collection of footnote-poems, "The Body: An Essay," three times now, and that thought keeps going through my mind. If this is, as the subtitle suggests, an essay, we must ask ourselves what the essay is about. From the very start, we are given a series of images and ideas which are developed, inverted, repeated, and questioned throughout; the bicycle, the dream, the text, the Bloomian anxiety of influence, and in all of these, as well as in its own way, as the title suggests, the physical body.

In "The Body," Boully does no more than any curious person does in internally debating the nature of existence, the purpose of literature, the meaning of love - but the way she does it is no less than calling to a memorable reckoning the history of human thought and writing. From the Bible to Laurence Sterne to Lacan, and much of what comes in between (and before/after), the scope and breadth of Boully's exposure and knowledge of what has been written on the subjects she treats is obvious in her engagements with and struggles to mine those sources and adapt them to her own purposes. What seems to result is a statement that these revered authorities have never been able to provide an answer to the questions that plague our attempts at epistemological clarity - and she is humble enough not to try offering her own work itself as an answer, but instead as a reevaluation of the questions.

Footnotes as footnotes are meant to illuminate or clarify the text to which they are appended. Giving us a series of footnotes to a text that's not there complicates things - it forces us to look "underneath," to the silences - to what we don't say, the letters we don't send, the truths we can't admit even to ourselves about ourselves. What revelations lay behind the paste-board masks that we present to the world as our selves? The oceans of blank space in this deceptively small (78 page) book tease us with a body that is still undefined, unexplored, unnameable as it were.

The dreams and fragments, scenarios of plays unacted, nondescript, and yet lush depictions of people without names, words we can't read, and conversations between people who don't hear each other - the footnotes themselves disorient our ideas of the world we arrange in order to make sense of. What appears at first glance to be a loose amalgamation of unrelated comments, reveals itself, in the course of reading, to be a carefully arranged, highly patterned series of musings, often simultaneously wary and celebratory of uncertainty. To read "The Body," at least for me, has been to lose, at least temporarily, the need to have everything make sense; to hear, see, and read answers to questions that I don't know how to ask.

This book, written by Jenny Boully, is an enjoyable, radical, & thoughtful journey through the labyrinths of memory. The Body deals with the nature of the self, the nature of the un/real, the nature of surfaces and strata. Subtext becomes text begets subtext, or something like that...I don't know if anyone has written a book full of footnotes-only before, but Jenny Boully has here & it's not just an empty, silly experiment with form, she uses the footnote to hint that there's something larger out there, unsaid, & hanging over us. Her narrator reflects this kind of paranoia at the Great Unknown, but it's not a grating voice, it's a guiding voice. If you're tired of today's generic poetry and fiction, try this book - you won't see anything else like it.

A friend told me about this book, and when I opened a copy - voila! - no text? It's like a memoir or diary written in footnotes and in someone else's hands it might not have come off too well. The author is wry and funny, down to earth, poking fun at herself, her relationships, and especially the literary world. It's hilarious that she mentions "Robert Kelly" in one of the footnotes and - lo and behold - he is one of the people praising the book on the back cover! Weird, very fun, and very unique stuff.

The language of this book is so idiosyncratic; how she phrases each thing she says is so unique, feels so strange. & the thoughts she has throughout this book, the whole way through without letting up ever, are brilliant. It's all very exciting. You know by now from what else you've read of heard about this book that it's all footnotes to an elided text, as poetry is the footnotes to a great unknown above us. The footnotes flow from the mysterious text, not from one another, so there's never any knowing what will happen next. Things open, & don't resolve. Instead, there's more opening. Another major stylistic decision of hers is that she eschews the post-Eliot evasive techniques so prevalent in modern poetry, directly communicating all these interesting thoughts & situations, metaphorical & otherwise, though this marvelously unique language. So it is an innovative book all around. I wonder what tdhe next book she publishes will be like. I foresee an exciting career ahead of her.

The Body is not merely a book, but a true tour de force debut: it is a celluloid strip in syllablles, stanzas, vowels, consonants, of one wonder after the next. Ms. Boully's language defies most paramaters of the conventional, but manages to pay homage to those voices of the past. I certainly do not like to compare one poet to the next because it is simply not fair to anyone involved, but one can clearly see that Ms. Boully is a well read, and well versed human being hellbent on changing things up. I anxiously await Ms. Boully's next volume. Bravo!

.

Jenny Boully weaves a haunting loose narrative of a lover missing their other, of someone existing in the open space that has been left by a departure. "The Body" is a text built completely out of footnotes, with a large white space hanging above these footnotes highlighting where a main text should be. Boully offers us the idea that all of life is actually the marginalia, and does so without weakening the quiet desire that serves as the glue between her words. This book exists somewhere between essay and poetry, and does not struggle to find a reconciliation between these two genres. Instead, it asserts its own terms from the very beginning, and is so inviting that the reader has no choice but to comply.

I wasted an evening attending a reading by the author and was foolish enough to purchase the book before the reading began. What a waste of time and money. This book is the embodiment of the modern "me, me, me" author who completely lacks talent or creativity and seeks a gimmick as a substitute. At 10 cents a copy, this book would still be a ripoff.