Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006
Click here to see the handbound edition (sold out) at Tarpaulin Sky Press [one love affair]* meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug-addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much a study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion. As with Jenny Boully's debut book The Body (2002), [one love affair]* is full of gaps and fissures and "seduces its reader by drawing unexpected but felicitous linkages between disparate citations from the history of literature," a work that is "filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination" (Christian Bok, Maisonneuve). Told through fragments that accrete through uncertain meanings, romanticized memories, and fleeting moments rather than clear narrative or linear time, [one love affair]* explores the spaces between too much and barely enough, fecundity and decay, the sublime and the disgusting, wholeness and emptiness, love and loneliness in a world where life can be interpreted as a series of love affairs that are "unwilling to complete." About Jenny Boully Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande, 2007), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006), and The Body (Essay Press, 2007; Slope Editions, 2002). Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and The Next American Essay and has appeared in Boston Review, Seneca Review, Tarpaulin Sky, and Conjunctions. Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she has studied at Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame and is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She divides her time between Brooklyn and a small town in Texas. Awards for [one love affair]* Winner of two awards from Coldfront: Best Book-Length Poem and Best First Lines. Nominated for three other awards from Coldfront: Best New Book of the Year, Best Second Book, and Best Technical Innovation. Reviews of [one love affair]* "A genre-bending back-pocket book. . . . Gritty and intellectual . . . addictive and soothing . . . fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf. . . . You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time." "Boully’s fluid, lyrical writing makes what could be a difficult, intimidating read instead a delightful one. . . . Playful engagement with narrative levels of reality (poems within poems, stories within stories). I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry." "Her fresh style challenges the ways in which we construct narratives and read texts . . . and ultimately leaves us wanting more, more, always more Boully."
"Boully has not only written the speaker’s one love affair, she has written our collective love affair. " "Boully’s language is accretive and lyrical. It is clear, feels clean in the mouth and sweet in the ear. . . . One begins to feel there another form embedded within the prose, though not a poetic form as much as the formed outline of a lover’s body, a book one has loved, one lover in a line of lovers, lying in the same bed as the former others." "Aside from the value of her incidental observations and asides, which are as sharp and well-made here as they are in The Body, the greatest virtue of [one love affair]* is Boully’s willingness to admit the personal and the narrative in such a way that doesn’t reinforce those very errors that make heartbreak in actual (if there is such a thing) love affairs inevitable." Also noted . . .
Interviews with Jenny Boully
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