tarpaulin sky press, 2006
Read by Catherine Paquette
As a sucker for literary remixes and works that blend genre, I have a special place in my heart for Brooklyn-based writer Jenny Boully. Her fresh style challenges the ways in which we construct narratives and read texts, and this is why her latest book of fiction / poetry / essays, [one love affair]*, jumped from the shelf into my hand, and then eagerly into this review.
As an extension of Boully’s first book, The Body — an “essay” composed entirely of footnotes, [one love affair]* continues to use footnotes and other texts to shape its narratives. By way of the three prose poems / essays that meditate on love and loss, Boully explores the idea that we always read ourselves into a text. In the first footnote, Boully writes:”[one love affair]* is meant to illustrate how, when reading, our minds often supply another narrative. This book is thus the narrative that snuck in when reading various books…” As the footnote explains, the book’s title, [one love affair]*, was taken from the cover of The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard. This is the first of many instances where fragments from various authors such as Duras, Beckett and Stein, among many others, appear.
Through the assorted writers that Boully references, the reader can gain insight into the core ideas found in [one love affair]*. Drawing on Carole Maso’s Ava in the book’s second poem, “He Wrote in Code,” lines like: “As seemingly random as it all appears — there are accumulated meanings” speak to Boully’s technique of using fragments to accumulate her own narrative. More explicitly three paragraphs down, Boully by way of Maso comments on her own book: “So that the form takes as many risks as the content, where I think love is the content and the risk is separation, and the pain is the returns, the repetitions, the completions, or the making meaning of.”
The book’s three prose poems, linked thematically by their ever-so-common “love gone wrong” narrative, play with repetition and the cyclical, almost addictive nature of such things, by recycling images, lines and ideas — many of which are sensory and make for a rich read. Though readers will be quite familiar with the “sordid love affair” narrative, Boully renders her stories originally enough to satisfy. Thus, like The Body, [one love affair]* is well worth the read, and ultimately leaves us wanting more, more, always more Boully.
