Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling:
In The Book of Beginnings and Endings, Jenny Boully offers her audience metaphors, text fragments, and notes on the “variety of winged creatures,” setting the stage for an innovative collection of essays (17). Giving only the beginning and end of each individual narrative, Boully skillfully manipulates her audience’s expectations of form and genre, opening in medias res and closing as further questions surface in the minds of her readers. Filled with works of prose that masquerade as novels, biographies, notebooks, and literary criticism, The Book of Beginnings and Endings takes on a range of voices, with lyricism and originality throughout.
While using templates not usually associated with the essay, Boully creates incongruities between form and style, invoking the techniques of poetry while writing textbooks and treatises. Exemplified by her arrangement of the individual pieces of The Book of Beginnings and Endings, Boully often circles back to images and phrases from earlier in her text, rather than adhering to the conventional narrative structure that these forms would suggest. This poetic use of fragmentation and ellipticism is particularly apparent in her essay “Every Winged Thing That Passes Unmolested Through Infinity.” For instance, she writes: “In other words, the representation of wings in art represents the actual wings, which in turn represent something else. The difficulty rests on trying to convey the true meaning of metaphor” (33). This text being part of a book mentioned in a previous essay, Boully revisits imagery from her earlier piece in an entirely different context, the idea of winged creatures having changed from an image of death and loss to one of rebirth. Because she structures her essay collection to effect such transitions, motifs shift meanings and reappear throughout The Book of Beginnings and Endings, forming a delightful contrast with the more linear narratives that she leads readers to anticipate.
Juxtaposing the mundane with the transcendent, Boully presents everyday objects alongside more philosophical observations, a theme that remains consistent as she appropriates forms and rhetoric from other texts. This trend, particularly prominent in her essay “Strange Mechanism for a Dream,” renders lofty observations suddenly tangible, often shimmering like “stars, such as quasars and pulsars” amidst cleaning solvents and carrier pigeons (33). For example, she writes: “In the dream, the doctor held the instrument that listens to life against my heart. I sent a telegraph to a cloud and out came a thousand souls. The telegraph said: forbear” (33). Pairing descriptions of ordinary things, such as stethoscopes and clouds, alongside conjecture and hyperbole, Boully’s work renders abstract ideas disconcertingly familiar. All points considered, “Strange Mechanism for a Dream,” like many essays in this collection, is at once thought-provoking and grounded in everyday life.
The Book of Beginnings and Endings is an inventive, engaging read. Ideal for readers of nonfiction and poetry alike, Boully’s new book gleans the best techniques from both genres.
Reviewed by Jac Jemc:
In one “ending” of this book, the narrator says the job of the poet is to “try to pin down the darkness between frames in a movie”(34). Despite our “eyes and neurons” relinquishing this to the impossible, the poet perseveres.
In The Book of Beginnings and Endings, Boully highlights the absent body of 52 fictional works by providing only the sections highlighted in the title: the first or last pages. The reader’s impulse is to bridge the synapse from one beginning to the next ending, and it’s this desire that makes the book so exciting. “The great space of the in between” is left to the reader to fill up (4). “The place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed – only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist” (8).
Early in the book, the mentioning of both beginnings and endings abound. “In the beginning, there were many signs that things would end soon,” and indeed they do, for there is an ending on every other page (9). The allusions to the format of the book are numerous enough that the reader knows this is no coincidental collection of first and last pages. Slowly, Boully’s other obsessions evidence themselves: winged death, clandestine notes hidden in books and quilts, the heaving sky, the apparentness of natural systems everywhere, loss and the attempt to recreate that loss.
The language Boully inhabits is a wonder all its own. “An Introduction to Invertebrate Zoology,” the story of a writer’s missing journal, and “A Heuristic Account of What is at Stake,” make up just a handful of the different voices Boully embodies in these pages. Yet, each narrator wanders in a familiar way. In the endnotes of a study of verb conjugations, the narrator digresses, “The negative is your enemy , the new woman in the bed sheets” (26). The reader expects a negative verb and is presented with a negative image. The acceptance of a twist such as this makes clear the confidence Boully and the audience have in each other, as well as the control she is exerting over her chosen form.
The Book of Beginnings and Endings deserves to be added to the short list of works better for the text they’ve lost: Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Sappho’s fragments to name just a couple. The primary difference is that Boully has had the foresight to recognize what joy can be had in imagining what has been lost. Pessoa’s gaps come from illegibility and a lack of chronology. Sappho’s spaces are simply the aftermath of time passing. Boully, however, has taken charge of such fissures and made them as much her own as the text which she provides.
I will digress for a moment, and say that I’ve personally always hated endings. I get no relief from knowing where the writer chooses to leave a story or idea. The ending seems to me nothing more than a fluorescent exit sign, obnoxiously obtrusive and glaringly plain. I prefer beginnings, when my mind is trying to grab hold of the language and grasp what it is it’s reading. Boully has created the perfect synthesis of both my favorite and least favorite features of writing. She has created a book, around which each page my mind must wrap itself anew, first and last alike. Suddenly, I enjoy the endings, when there is something waiting for me beyond them.
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Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and nonfiction. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Janus Head, Rattle, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, The Adirondack Review, The Main Street Rag, CutBank, The Mid-American Review, Jacket, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.
Jac Jemc received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her
poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Sleepingfish,
Zoland Poetry, 5_trope, The Denver Quarterly and elimae. Jac is an editorial assistant for The Means and
a bookseller in Chicago.
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