Jenny Boully is a Thai American poet and essayist whose work moves through lyric essay, prose poetry, paratext, absence, memory, love, literary theory, and experimental form. Her books include The Body: An Essay, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, [one love affair]*, and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
Boully belongs among contemporary poets and essayists whose work treats the page itself as literary material. Footnotes, gaps, missing bodies, beginnings, endings, quotation, dream, criticism, and remembered fragments can all become structural elements.
The Body: An Essay
The Body: An Essay, first published in 2002, became one of Boully’s defining works. The book is built largely from footnotes to an absent primary text. Its missing center turns annotation into the main field of experience.
The form makes absence visible. Notes point toward a body of writing the reader cannot access directly, so interpretation, memory, desire, and scholarly apparatus begin to generate their own narrative.
Betwixt-and-Between
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, published by Coffee House Press in 2018, gathers essays on writing, reading, love, dream, uncertainty, and artistic practice. The book moves through reflection, literary theory, memory, and imaginative association.
Writing appears as a lived condition shaped by doubt, desire, failure, and discovery. The collection also extends Boully’s long interest in forms that sit between conventional genre categories.
The Book of Beginnings and Endings
The Book of Beginnings and Endings, published by Sarabande Books in 2007, assembles opening and closing passages for more than fifty imagined books while leaving their middles absent. The missing center turns narrative expectation into the book’s governing device.
Beginnings promise worlds; endings imply worlds already lived through. By placing those thresholds beside one another, Boully makes incompleteness a form of imaginative pressure.
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2011, revisits the imaginative world of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Wendy, Peter, Hook, Smee, Tiger Lily, and the Lost Boys enter a prose field shaped by desire, menace, quotation, bodily detail, memory, and repetition.
Barrie’s language remains visible through citation while Boully’s prose alters the emotional atmosphere around familiar characters. Neverland becomes a place where literary inheritance and adult knowledge continually disturb one another.
Paratext and absence
Boully’s writing repeatedly gives literary margins a central role. Footnotes, parenthetical remarks, missing middles, citations, fragments, and after-images carry as much emotional and intellectual pressure as conventional narrative.
This practice places her work naturally beside experimental poetry and hybrid literature concerned with how books organize attention.
[one love affair]*
[one love affair]* continues Boully’s interest in gaps, citations, interpretation, and the unstable relation between memory and text. Love becomes something reconstructed from fragments, references, and traces.
Recognition and teaching
Boully received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. She teaches at Bennington College and serves as core faculty in the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her education includes an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Further reading
Explore American poetry, modern poetry, and the poets directory for related writers and traditions.