The Body: An Essay

Rating:
Summary: Excitement! Not to be labeled.
Review: A few months ago I was fortunate enought to attain a copy of The Body by Jenny Boully, and what first came to mind was the fact that a new writer had finally arrived, and a young one at that. Quite the accomplishment.

The Body is not merely a text, but an organic feature, 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 this is one well read, and well versed human being hellbent on changing things up. I anxiously await Ms. Boully's next volume. Bravo!

In addendum, to the reviewer who said he/she wasted time and money, please do us all a favor and create something rather than choosing to be another cookie-cutter, disgruntled, simple and common pundit. There are plenty of stodgy bios on current politics you can vent on.

Rating:
Summary: Asinine
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Asinine
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: "Everything That Is Said Is Said Underneath"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: "Everything That Is Said Is Said Underneath"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a language of her own, a dream of her own
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a language of her own, a dream of her own
Review: 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.