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I do not know of a single essayist working right now who can match Jenny’s drive for innovation in nonfiction, her keen sense of form, her playful use of the genre’s conventions, and her vigorously subversive engagement with a heritage that she simultaneously seems deeply in love with. Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch. —John D’Agata
The Book of Beginnings and Endings is just such a book. Even if the reader invents the middles, they will not attach end to end. This would merely multiply the options. There are so many seasons to pass through, so many stories to occupy. And the reader’s speculations are by necessity ephemeral, incomplete, propelled as one is to the next possible start or finish. It is an eloquent shoring up of fragments, a potentially infinite poem. The binding is neither genre nor gender but eros itself, both of the physical variety and the type that caresses the noun and its attendants. Anne Carson comes to mind. But so does Lawrence Durrell, because cerebral as the book is, it is often winkingly so, and if not the overlay, the interior is sensual. This is Boully’s third collection. Each is a loving adventure in writing and reading. —C. D. Wright
How does the story begin? How does it end? This is what The Book of Beginnings and Endings will tell you, but nothing more. The middle—with its arguments, segues, denouement—isn’t there. These are beginnings that wave goodbye with the door flung wide open, endings that open in medias res. Throwing her voice in a feat of lyrical ventriloquism, Jenny Boully tunes into every station to open or close more than fifty books ranging in subject matter from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love.
Jenny Boully is the author of The Body:An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002 and Essay Press, 2007) and [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in Seneca Review, Boston Review, and Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she has studied at Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.
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