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[one love affair]*
Poetry. [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 as 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 Boully 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."
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 Boully 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."
67 pages, Paperback
First published April 24, 2006
About the author
Jenny Boully
18 books84 followersJenny Boully is the author of four books, most recently not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky Press). Her other books include The Books of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions). Her chapbook of prose,Moveable Types, was released by Noemi Press. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Next American Essay, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and other places. Born in Thailand, she was reared in Texas by parents who farm and fish. She attended Hollins University, where she double majored in English and philosophy and then went on to earn her MA in English Criticism and Writing. At the University of Notre Dame, she earned an MFA with a poetry concentration. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She lives in Chicago, Illinois with her husband and daughter and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
February 19, 2017
I've admired Jenny Boully's writing since first seeing it anthologized in Great American Prose Poems but had not thought about her work for many years. Then I stumbled on this powerful essay of hers on pot Thai, Thai cooking, and her Thai identity in an old TriQuarterly and realized it was high time to re-engage: http://www.triquarterly.org/issues/is...
This book is divided into three sections. For me, the first section, titled "[one love affair]" (like the title of the book without the asterisk) dragged somewhat; while reading it, I considered abandoning the book unfinished. The language was admittedly lyrical, but the vessel that contained it felt so formless that I was constantly losing my focus, losing the thread. And the use of repetition didn't always succeed at creating the emotional effects it seemed to be trying for. For me, the book hit its stride in the second section ("He Wrote in Code"), a long prose poem or lyrical essay that, with much greater directness and vivid specificity than the first section, elegizes the untimely death of a flawed, unfaithful lover with schizophrenia. Quote: "It wasn't so much that I was losing you, it was that I was losing the magical way in which you saw the world."
This second section also paints a fascinating picture of a woman who feels conflicted with regard to the idea of being pregnant. I've gotten to a point where I think I've read one too many poems enthusiastically celebrating pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, etc., etc., so it was refreshing to come across this more darkly ambivalent take on the subject: "I am too often pregnant in my dreams and it does bother me somewhat that I refuse delivery when it needs to happen, claiming that I can't have my baby because I won't be pregnant anymore and that is where the emptiness begins." And later: "For me, pregnancy is a thought that is blue-green, something that shimmers and sparkles and is found only entangled deep in sea, caught in deadly anemones, clutching sea grass." And later: "Mud-dauber females create the nest, but I have never seen their young emerging, only the holes left behind."
One characteristic feature of Boully's writing is a willingness to make the self appear ugly, even as the lyricism of her language remains unimpeachably lovely. There is always a self-excoriating process of self-examination going on in her writing: she is constantly turning over the dirt of what she seems to view as her own nature, of what she seems to view as human nature, and presenting it in all its imperfections, its sometimes sick and stunted weirdness, its tendencies toward spite and pettiness and self-pity. A passage from the third section ("There Is Scarcely More Than There Is") that resonated with me: "I was not quite twelve when they told me that I was ugly.... I kept thinking about it: the injustice done to characters and how they will have to, at the bequest of a heartless author, carry something ill with them their whole lives. In my case: ugliness. In my case: self-hate." (I'm well aware that the "I" in poetry should never be assumed to be the writer herself, but the willingness to impute ugliness to that "I" is nonetheless something I find courageous, a rarity.)
What I think is Boully's greatest strength, though, is her inexhaustible experimentation: though all the works I have read by her have been prose poems / lyrical essays, there is immense variation in how she approaches this medium in each individual piece. "He appeared then...." (from Great American Prose Poems) has a radically different structure from "A Short Essay on Being," which in turn differs dramatically in its structure from either "[one love affair]" or "He Wrote in Code," even though they are all prose poems / lyrical essays. In "He Wrote in Code," Boully quotes the author Carole Maso saying, "So that the form takes as many risks as the content": this could be taken as Boully's overall writing motto.
This book is divided into three sections. For me, the first section, titled "[one love affair]" (like the title of the book without the asterisk) dragged somewhat; while reading it, I considered abandoning the book unfinished. The language was admittedly lyrical, but the vessel that contained it felt so formless that I was constantly losing my focus, losing the thread. And the use of repetition didn't always succeed at creating the emotional effects it seemed to be trying for. For me, the book hit its stride in the second section ("He Wrote in Code"), a long prose poem or lyrical essay that, with much greater directness and vivid specificity than the first section, elegizes the untimely death of a flawed, unfaithful lover with schizophrenia. Quote: "It wasn't so much that I was losing you, it was that I was losing the magical way in which you saw the world."
This second section also paints a fascinating picture of a woman who feels conflicted with regard to the idea of being pregnant. I've gotten to a point where I think I've read one too many poems enthusiastically celebrating pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, etc., etc., so it was refreshing to come across this more darkly ambivalent take on the subject: "I am too often pregnant in my dreams and it does bother me somewhat that I refuse delivery when it needs to happen, claiming that I can't have my baby because I won't be pregnant anymore and that is where the emptiness begins." And later: "For me, pregnancy is a thought that is blue-green, something that shimmers and sparkles and is found only entangled deep in sea, caught in deadly anemones, clutching sea grass." And later: "Mud-dauber females create the nest, but I have never seen their young emerging, only the holes left behind."
One characteristic feature of Boully's writing is a willingness to make the self appear ugly, even as the lyricism of her language remains unimpeachably lovely. There is always a self-excoriating process of self-examination going on in her writing: she is constantly turning over the dirt of what she seems to view as her own nature, of what she seems to view as human nature, and presenting it in all its imperfections, its sometimes sick and stunted weirdness, its tendencies toward spite and pettiness and self-pity. A passage from the third section ("There Is Scarcely More Than There Is") that resonated with me: "I was not quite twelve when they told me that I was ugly.... I kept thinking about it: the injustice done to characters and how they will have to, at the bequest of a heartless author, carry something ill with them their whole lives. In my case: ugliness. In my case: self-hate." (I'm well aware that the "I" in poetry should never be assumed to be the writer herself, but the willingness to impute ugliness to that "I" is nonetheless something I find courageous, a rarity.)
What I think is Boully's greatest strength, though, is her inexhaustible experimentation: though all the works I have read by her have been prose poems / lyrical essays, there is immense variation in how she approaches this medium in each individual piece. "He appeared then...." (from Great American Prose Poems) has a radically different structure from "A Short Essay on Being," which in turn differs dramatically in its structure from either "[one love affair]" or "He Wrote in Code," even though they are all prose poems / lyrical essays. In "He Wrote in Code," Boully quotes the author Carole Maso saying, "So that the form takes as many risks as the content": this could be taken as Boully's overall writing motto.
September 29, 2017
This is a dense book of prose poems that uses footnotes to literature the author is reading at the time she is writing. At least that is what I think is going on. Unusual to have footnotes in a poetry book, but this is a cross gendre book weaving in words from other authors. Jenny Boully is a lyrical writer and I love the many images that float and weave through the book, each section folding in on itself with repetitions that breathe familiarity and a sense of following.
Section one named after the book [one love affair] is a series of prose poems. Lines pop out: "How/does the body manage the next day with no sleep?/She knew it had something to do with aging,/something to do with somehow being able to do this/now but never again. After work, she would begin/again and as she must, knowing that/what must be done had more to do with the poppies/all gone to seed,"
Section two, He Wrote in Code, is also a footnote, the title taken from Carole Maso's "Ava," with a note that the piece draws on the form of the book "Ava" and includes quoted passages. It is one long poem. She writes, "Pregnancy flashes, a keen knife parting the silently/tremulous waters." She makes reference to haiku, and to renga forms that she writes with her lover. My favorite part that brought a smile, is this section:
"The waiter, confused by our choices—2 Sprites, 2
Cokes, 2 coffees, 2 waters, and 2 beers—was even
more perplexed by how he might place all the bever-
ages, along with the pizza, on the table-for-two.
I was pretty then. You told me you were happy to be
holding the hand of a girl who is pretty.
After a day of traveling, we simply wanted everything,
but really, it was because we did not know, had a dif-
ficult time knowing what it was that we wanted;
it was because it would also take us so long to be sure
that we wanted what it really was that we wanted;
more difficult, we questioned our motives for wanting
whatever it was we wanted. And so, we con-
sumed quietly; we consumed quietly while New York
busily tried to sell us flowers which, of course, you
refused to buy me."
Later in the poem she gives him flowers as he departs. and later, "In the cafe of The Next Morning, in the cafe of A Plane/Departing, we ordered juice and coffee and sangria and/champagne and beer and Sprite." And together they wrote a renga. There are also voices that enter the main character's head. As the poem progresses she starts leaving off periods at the end of sections of the poem. She quotes Maso, "Maso writes that this life is "[a]s short as one of these/sentences. As breif as that. But with a certain quiet/beauty. As seemingly random as it all appears—there/are accumulated meanings." The word schizophrenic pops up, capitalized. She references her earlier book "The Art Lover." We learn that "Years later, you would, in the mountains. drive it off a/cliff. And it was over and that was it. I would never hear/from you again."
I think there is much code in this section of the book.
The third section of the book is titled There Is Scarcely More Than There Is, a Gertrude Stein quote. Here is another series of poems with footnotes. In the poem ...another abundant source of hurt... (footnoted) is the line, "[I don't know really how writers can/go on this way, having to make sense of everything." Truly, this is true! I feel to truly make sense of her book I need to follow her path, read the books she read, which I mostly have not. The footnotes make it seem an academic course. But I am glad to have read it, and suggest reading it for the lyric, the images, the lines, the beauty that is there on the page.
Section one named after the book [one love affair] is a series of prose poems. Lines pop out: "How/does the body manage the next day with no sleep?/She knew it had something to do with aging,/something to do with somehow being able to do this/now but never again. After work, she would begin/again and as she must, knowing that/what must be done had more to do with the poppies/all gone to seed,"
Section two, He Wrote in Code, is also a footnote, the title taken from Carole Maso's "Ava," with a note that the piece draws on the form of the book "Ava" and includes quoted passages. It is one long poem. She writes, "Pregnancy flashes, a keen knife parting the silently/tremulous waters." She makes reference to haiku, and to renga forms that she writes with her lover. My favorite part that brought a smile, is this section:
"The waiter, confused by our choices—2 Sprites, 2
Cokes, 2 coffees, 2 waters, and 2 beers—was even
more perplexed by how he might place all the bever-
ages, along with the pizza, on the table-for-two.
I was pretty then. You told me you were happy to be
holding the hand of a girl who is pretty.
After a day of traveling, we simply wanted everything,
but really, it was because we did not know, had a dif-
ficult time knowing what it was that we wanted;
it was because it would also take us so long to be sure
that we wanted what it really was that we wanted;
more difficult, we questioned our motives for wanting
whatever it was we wanted. And so, we con-
sumed quietly; we consumed quietly while New York
busily tried to sell us flowers which, of course, you
refused to buy me."
Later in the poem she gives him flowers as he departs. and later, "In the cafe of The Next Morning, in the cafe of A Plane/Departing, we ordered juice and coffee and sangria and/champagne and beer and Sprite." And together they wrote a renga. There are also voices that enter the main character's head. As the poem progresses she starts leaving off periods at the end of sections of the poem. She quotes Maso, "Maso writes that this life is "[a]s short as one of these/sentences. As breif as that. But with a certain quiet/beauty. As seemingly random as it all appears—there/are accumulated meanings." The word schizophrenic pops up, capitalized. She references her earlier book "The Art Lover." We learn that "Years later, you would, in the mountains. drive it off a/cliff. And it was over and that was it. I would never hear/from you again."
I think there is much code in this section of the book.
The third section of the book is titled There Is Scarcely More Than There Is, a Gertrude Stein quote. Here is another series of poems with footnotes. In the poem ...another abundant source of hurt... (footnoted) is the line, "[I don't know really how writers can/go on this way, having to make sense of everything." Truly, this is true! I feel to truly make sense of her book I need to follow her path, read the books she read, which I mostly have not. The footnotes make it seem an academic course. But I am glad to have read it, and suggest reading it for the lyric, the images, the lines, the beauty that is there on the page.
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December 10, 2020beautiful ~ like trying to untangle a necklace and knots keep appearing. loved the footnotes in this, now i have more things to read!!! and after i read what's in the footnotes it'll be fun to return to this and maybe see how those books are linked to this one.
November 16, 2017
A little book that really took off for me in the second prose poem/lyrical essay. There are some beautiful lines and I liked the citations of other authors, they were little Easter eggs for me. Was only 60ish pages, felt like it'd be perfectly suited for somewhere outdoors on a spring day. Though mental illness (and suicide) was referenced a number of times it didn't feel heavy or accusatory in a jolting way (as sometimes 'loved one of a person with mental illness' writing can be).
January 24, 2013
This book feels, and probably is, a project-book, where Boully takes three stages of a relationship (or so I'm reading it-- maybe it's one stage three times?) and kind of presents it as annotations to other things she is reading. The three sections are themselves made up of fragments, which are often either informed by or directly taken from texts that Boully is reading at the time. So there's a little bit of _Reality Hunger_ here, and probably something like a Federman "critifiction" happening, too, though of course this is an essay.
I like the project as far as I understand it, but wasn't so crazy about the results in two of the essays here-- the first two sections didn't have enough in them, for me, in terms of sheer readerly stuff to make me interested (though there are some strong images in the first section). But I felt like the third section, "There is scarcely more than this" achieved a kind of lyrical density that I did find rewarding. I cringe inside admitting that, because I feel a little like it's probably the most familiar in style, the least fresh of the essays collected here. But still, it was my favorite, and I thought it was really very good.
I like the project as far as I understand it, but wasn't so crazy about the results in two of the essays here-- the first two sections didn't have enough in them, for me, in terms of sheer readerly stuff to make me interested (though there are some strong images in the first section). But I felt like the third section, "There is scarcely more than this" achieved a kind of lyrical density that I did find rewarding. I cringe inside admitting that, because I feel a little like it's probably the most familiar in style, the least fresh of the essays collected here. But still, it was my favorite, and I thought it was really very good.
September 4, 2017
Prose poem, essay on writing, proof-by-example (reading as an act of stealing art from the artist to justify one's own choices), musing, doodling, repurposing of other's ideas--this short work was hard for me to get my head around, not least because it was very difficult to keep track of what was the author's, and what was a riff on one of her sources, and what those pieces from others' work might have meant had they not been ripped out of context (or--not ripped, but stashed away and re-emerging in a totally different context). I admire this piece more than I "like" it. But I appreciate reading a non-narrative work that requires me to think differently about reading.
October 2, 2023
[one love affair] is a collection of poems about a girl and two lovers- both of whom are wrong for her, one of whom is older and gloriously toxic, this is the “one love affair”. The poetry in this collection is mostly prose poetry. It definitely puts the reader in the mindset of the 24 year old speaker clinging to the idea of someone rather than acknowledging who they truly are. It has death, drugs, and beautiful repetitive, cycling metaphors. It’s lovely in a sad, lingering kind of way.
March 25, 2018
A striking fragmented and obsessive text, trying to make sense of memories of a short-termed love and their death. Lyrical scrawlings hold weight alongside embedded quotes from philosophical writers and poets, stealing from art history as a way to make sense of her own history. A prose poem or a notebook always mirroring itself, weaving in and out of self awareness and potent idealizations. There's a sense of absence in the text, and codes that can never be solved, making the absence of the lover depicted seem all the more devastating, peculiar, and real.
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July 5, 2022i think i stole some epigraphs from lines in this. pretty sure i did that actually
January 22, 2008
Because spring is not quite summer, Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* is the perfect book of poetry to read in summer while wistful for spring. Or thinking of past loves and varieties of flowers. Or perhaps it is not a book of poetry at all, but a collection of sentences as ephemeral as, “an emptiness floating within the hollow of her pond boat.” In any season, you might open Boully’s book and read a sentence that says, “On the dock over the sea, everything smells like flowers and trees, the too-perfect scenery was all make-believe” and wonder when she writes, “I only said I loved you in my poetry” if the truth was in the speaking, in the poetry, or in all three being too fleeting to pin down; like a lepidopterist rolling a pupa between her fingers, eager for the butterfly she will one day mount and examine.
February 11, 2023
Enjoyable, amusing. Non-linear narrative/obscurity balanced with familiar/revisited images. I was a bit annoyed by all the citations, but it had merit and made for some very interesting titles. Some gems:
"...She would remember an orange boat tied to a dock, a dock that she wanted, and know that it wasn't him but the water she was in love with."
"...could not help her to accept the fact that in living, some things are just broken and therefore own their own beauty."
"In the vase of hydrangeas, the hydrangeas suited the vase rather well, excepting of course, the bumblebee that wished to, but could take its place among them. ... How else to motion to the figs, that they were readied for quartering? In the bowl filled with water, the green beans floated on the surface, as if they had never been loved by the bottom of anything..."
"...She would remember an orange boat tied to a dock, a dock that she wanted, and know that it wasn't him but the water she was in love with."
"...could not help her to accept the fact that in living, some things are just broken and therefore own their own beauty."
"In the vase of hydrangeas, the hydrangeas suited the vase rather well, excepting of course, the bumblebee that wished to, but could take its place among them. ... How else to motion to the figs, that they were readied for quartering? In the bowl filled with water, the green beans floated on the surface, as if they had never been loved by the bottom of anything..."
September 20, 2009
This book didn't catch me the way her other (The Body) did. I thought the cover is one of the prettiest I've seen lately; I loved the literary references throughout - a writer talking about writing through writing never fails to elicit some secret joy from me, like a stranger letting you into a private joke. But some of the vaguer references were lost on me and I didn't like having to turn to the back of the book every time I needed confirmation (would have preferred footnotes).
Boully's way of describing images is gorgeous (my favorite section was about the mimosa tree), colors pop from the pages. But I felt a bit adrift without having a class like Sarah's Lyric Essay to give me the structure and feedback that is absent from this "Fiction/Poetry/Essay." Perhaps if this was a book discussed in a book club - it's something I would like to hear discussed, dialogued.
Boully's way of describing images is gorgeous (my favorite section was about the mimosa tree), colors pop from the pages. But I felt a bit adrift without having a class like Sarah's Lyric Essay to give me the structure and feedback that is absent from this "Fiction/Poetry/Essay." Perhaps if this was a book discussed in a book club - it's something I would like to hear discussed, dialogued.
September 14, 2008
I wish that I could give this book 10 stars. This tiny little book (65 pages) is so intensely beautiful that it gave me butterflies in my stomach. The narrative is shaped by the author's reading of other works which are referenced in footnotes. The prose poems are renditions of her thoughts while reading other texts and, as a blurb on the back of the book comments, it is really about the nature of reading and how our minds process another's story and lay our own stream-of-conscious thoughts over it.
February 15, 2008
mindy bought me this book for my birthday after i couldn't find it in the library.
i read this on the train and finished during my lunch break. it needs more than five stars. i really can't say anything that would be good enough for it.
seems alarmingly applicable to our lives; mine, mindy's, shane's, sarah's. all of us. even if the certain situations aren't specifically the same. the feeling is.
i read this on the train and finished during my lunch break. it needs more than five stars. i really can't say anything that would be good enough for it.
seems alarmingly applicable to our lives; mine, mindy's, shane's, sarah's. all of us. even if the certain situations aren't specifically the same. the feeling is.
September 12, 2008
this is brilliant. boully has matured as a writer from her appearance in one of the "best american poetry" anthologies where her poem was composed entirely of footnotes--no text, just footnotes. this "collection" is a brilliant depiction of our lives being informed by what we read, and our reading being informed by our lives. we are complicit in the texts we read.
June 25, 2009
This is an amazing work in both form and context. Guided by the notion that other's work influences ours, Boully lifts lines from books and placesthem within hers. It is a hybrid of collage and personal writing. This, ironically, inspires me. Would borrowing her borrowed approach be rerecycling? I digress.
April 22, 2017
“In last correspondences, never so much about what it was that really did happen in the end, in the very end. There is instead so much talk about beginnings. An so, that is where, for so long, I stayed, within budding hydrangeas, within unnameable endless flowerings.”
dear god, this book has taken something from me I will never get back, and given me something I will never lose.
dear god, this book has taken something from me I will never get back, and given me something I will never lose.
December 9, 2014
On the back of this book where usually it indicates where things should be shelved, there is written ESSAY/FICTION/POETRY. Spread a little thin, truthfully - I could tell you nothing about what this book is about, but could tell you all about what it's trying to do.
January 13, 2008
It's so perfect. You can kind of read it all at the same time, or I guess in one sitting is the way to put it. There's this part about green beans floating up in a bowl of water and it is nice.
November 23, 2008
Parenethetical, narrative, filled with blanks, and experimentation. I love Boully.
February 3, 2011
but i like jenny boully
June 23, 2010
It will take at least ten more readings before I could possibly comment on this. That I am willing to read this ten more times is a comment though.
May 31, 2012
Metaphors, we said, and I did not know when it was that you were playing and when it was that you were not. You were never
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August 30, 2015I learn something new from Boully every time I read her.
December 30, 2012
a hauntingly beautiful book.
August 5, 2013
After a second reading, I am more curious, more confused, and more aware of how it invites my own narrative into the reading.
November 5, 2014
I enjoyed the use of recurring images in this short read, but some of the storyline was lost on me due to constraints put on the author.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews