Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.
A poet and essayist likens writing to witchcraft, love, and “the craft of getting someone to love me.”
As a teacher, Boully (Creative Writing and Literature/Columbia Coll. Chicago; of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures, 2012, etc.) was visited by a textbook representative who offered her many books to help teach her students the craft of poetry or nonfiction writing. Horrified, she recalled the exercises she had encountered as an undergraduate, which resembled “therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma.” For Boully, the process is far different, rooted in a philosophical journey for meaning, sincerity, and, not least, love. “I expect my students to essay fiercely and obsessively,” she writes. In her own work, an essay “may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for.” The pieces in this captivating collection—versions of which were previously published in literary journals—reflect Boully’s discomfort with genre: some are prose poems, some collages of fragments, bits of “veiled memoir,” and evocative digressions. “It seems to me,” she writes ruefully, “that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination.” The author’s prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis’—spare, elliptical, unexpected—and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein’s. In the literary world, Boully confesses, her genre-bending often causes consternation. “I may look like an essay, but I don’t act like one,” she writes. “I may look like prose, but I don’t speak like it.” She may look like a poet, too, or a fiction writer: “The need to write fictions,” she offers, “arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another.
Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56689-510-1
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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