Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award in
Nonfiction
"[Boully's] prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis'--spare,
elliptical, unexpected--and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of
Gertrude Stein's. . . . Graceful meditations on love, loneliness,
and the magic of words." --Kirkus
"Fellow practitioners of literary nonfiction will find Boully's
writing relatable and charming." --Publishers Weekly
"I cherish my fevers because they begin to break down the edges of
the self I've so meticulously constructed in my waking life. Jenny
Boully's sentences have a similar effect on me. She comes by her
slippages and seams honestly. One gets the sense that she has
straddled the space between waking and dreaming, not writing and
writing, her whole life, and has something real to tell you about
the time she's spent in the in-between. You should follow her as
far as you can go." --Ander Monson
"[Boully] lingers on the joys and challenges of the uncertainty
that accompanies creative work. The result is a slim book that
captures an author's practice and the relationships she draws
between writing and falling in love, dreaming and memory." --Poets
& Writers
"[Betwixt-and-Between is] a book for fans of the lyric essay and
for those who want to think about writing and the creative life."
--BookRiot
"Boully's thought process, as seen on the page, is a pure pleasure
to behold--she's full of delight and her words offer sensations
beyond what mere words usually do." --Nylon "Formally inventive and
frequently gripping, the essays in this collection from Jenny
Boully demonstrate just how challenging literature can be a mirror
of its author's psyche and concerns -- and the often transcendental
charge that can emerge from immersing oneself in them." --Vol. 1
Brooklyn
"Boully's collection reminds us that there is a story not just on
the pages we produce, but for every phase of our writing life, and
for every genre, voice and style we pursue." --Electric
Literature
"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." --Literary
Hub
"Betwixt-and-Between is haunted by a lost love, a persona (or
perhaps a series of figures) who appears and disappears throughout
the book; the conflation of writing and loving is direct . . .
Writing, loving, and losing braid together, forming and deforming
each other in a fractious snarl." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Shifting and resisting, Boully has given us a collection of essays
that also functions as a craft book in motion--not a set of
directives but evidence of a writing life lived. It is everything
we could want, but not as we expect." --Brevity
"[Betwixt-and-Between is] not only a powerful demonstration of
writing as life, but of the ways that lived experiences can
illuminate and transform writing." --Star Tribune
"Boully's writing is a glimmering landscape, a series of
more-true-than-true snapshots which capture what it means to exist
simultaneously within and without the page--a kind of existence
that can only be shown through imagined loves, daydreams, moths,
memories, hunger, outer space, and electronic bleeps." --Arkansas
International
"The writings of Jenny Boully occupy the space between genres and
forms, eluding attempts to place them in one tradition or another.
In this collection of essays, which spans Boully's career as a
writer to date, Boully explores her own feelings on literary
techniques, and reveals the personal underpinnings for some of her
boldest decisions as a writer." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Boully's lyric essays, which wander through disparate histories,
myths, and stories, produce emotional truth in their ordering of
disorder. Her essays, like lovers, follow desire in the hope that
it will take them somewhere new." --Ploughshares
"Jenny Boully's newest collection brings together her essays on the
writing life, including her coming-of-age as a poet, the magic of
writing craft, and the relationship between writing and the nature
of being." --The Margins
"In Betwixt-and-Between, Jenny Boully gathers disparate instances
and encounters and weaves them into sumptuous lyric essays
that--while deeply sensual--also reveal 'the inner working of
things.' She inscribes the part of us between the world and the
body, the space that receives the world, then turns it into a dream
in order to more deeply understand it. In this new collection,
Jenny Boully evokes knowledge's ephemeral core, how it looks in the
air or as a meadow, her brilliance inflected with lyric witchery."
--Carmen Giménez Smith
"Anybody can have a thought--they cost nothing, on the
internet--but to capture the drama of someone thinking on the page
is a rare and difficult thing. That's where the action of an essay
is, and the intimacy too, and in Jenny Boully's latest collection
we draw so near the mind of the maker we seem to fall down through
ourselves, into a new and wholly strange concentration.
Betwixt-and-Between leaves behind an accurate record of the trouble
Boully encounters in her search for the simplest way to say complex
things about sincerity and beauty and love and happiness--and yes,
all those shy hopes are here, all caught on the sly, in this wonder
of a book." --Charles D'Ambrosio
"[Boully] captures trains of thought like breezes through her
fingers, which she has a rare gift for taming long enough to lie
still and be regarded." --NewCity
Praise for Jenny Boully:
"Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly
arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch." --John
D'Agata
"Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and
unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.' Jenny Boully has
done it." --Mary Jo Bang
"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer--in the best way." --Ander
Monson
"Boully seduces [her reader] by drawing unexpected but felicitous
linkages between disparate citations from the history of
literature. . . . Filled with the exegetical projection of our own
imagination." --Christian Bök
"In Boully's writing, there are no beginnings or endings; instead,
we are presented with impressions, threads, and flashes of
narrative. Within the space of these short paragraphs, we are
compelled to narrate our own ideas about the pleasures and failures
of love. . . . There are many questions in this work that are left
unanswered, as well as many silences surrounding what happened 'in
the end.' Yes, there is much talk about beginnings, but we are
never truly situated 'in the beginning.' Instead, we remain in the
continual becoming of love and loss, memory and perception,
narrative and poetry. We stay, as the various characters and the
speaker herself, 'within unnameable endless flowerings.'" --Craig
Santos Perez
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