The variety of the essay form is its beauty—prose, poetry or pictures, words or film, lyrical or narrative among so many other untidy options. It’s the category for otherness. Jenny Boully, Columbia College professor of creative writing and literature, gracefully explores her personal and professional defiance of categorization in her new collection “Betwixt-And-Between: Essays on the Writing Life.” Of Thai and Cherokee heritage, Boully grew up in Texas, not fitting neatly into any of the boxes on the identity portion of an SAT test. With topics from poetry to junior-high boyfriends to astrophysics, some selections start as a set of instructions for how to write but meld into examinations of otherness, hope, failed relationships or yearning for children, connection and eternity. She captures trains of thought like breezes through her fingers, which she has a rare gift for taming long enough to lie still and be regarded. Boully writes for the same reason that she loves: “to make it so that I truly exist.” She encourages student writers to persevere with promises that “there will be a heavenly castle; there is a holy grail; there did fall golden apples.” I can’t help but believe her.
Another new work that defies classification is “Monster Portraits” by siblings Del and Sofia Samatar, who have Somali-American heritage. This cabinet of curiosities is a hybrid of text and comic-book-style pictures. It creates a fantastical mythology of beasts, some who appear in real, sometimes tragic places—the Rwandan genocide, a tube station in London. In each short portrait, Sofia’s imaginative prose mixes fantasy with autobiography to examine the relationship between monster and witness. Which is which? The monster is always the other, a result of the instance where “the normal has failed to occur”—and that depends largely on context. The monster (e.g. refugee, person of color, underling, woman) doesn’t belong in the realm in which it finds itself a foreigner, without power. Be careful not to quickly choose which to fear: the monster or the cataloguer. (Kate Burns)
“Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life” By Jenny Boully Coffee House Press, 152 pages, $16.95
“Monster Portraits” By Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar Rose Metal Press, 78 pages, $14.95
Jenny Boully launches her book on April 13 at 7:30pm and Sofia Samatar and Chris Abani will be in conversation about memoir and the speculative on May 17 at 7:30pm at Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark, (773)769-9299.
Kate Burns is a writer, musician and voiceover talent living in Chicago. Her voice haunted the elevator in her gynecologist’s building until by chance the practice moved. She taught preschool Spanish for three years and, like a bartender, grew to rely on the security of having a guitar, or a bar, between herself and the patrons. It’s only a matter of time before she succumbs to her family’s lobbying for a dog. You may see her walking this dog on Chicago’s wintry sidewalks with a leash in one mittened hand and a tissue in the other. She enjoys knitting rectangles in large font while binge-watching TV. She rues the fact that she hasn’t been to a movie in several adjacent seasons, but give her a book and she’s golden. She likes gardening. Plants are quiet. Her one and only child challenges her daily like the Mack truck of karma. Her favorite animals are seahorses and hummingbirds and her favorite food is popcorn. She decided on these as a teenager and hasn’t revised her opinions.
We Can’t Delay Our Joy: An Interview with Roger Reeves About His New Book, “Dark Days: Fugitive Essays” Reeves has a shelf full of honors, but his new book, “Dark Days,” is not poetry, but essays. In rich and heady prose, Reeves mixes memoir, theory and literary criticism. His subjects range from an opera singer breaking a silence curfew by singing in the streets to the “hush harbors,” where enslaved people would steal away to pray.
