Devil's Lake reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown....

Not sure how we missed this, when it first went live in April, but Rebecca Hazelton published a great review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.

Here's a snippet:

Peter and Wendy is [J.M.] Barrie’s novelization of a stage play, originally intended for adults but significantly altered for a child audience. The later Disney adaptation, Peter Pan, bears only a passing resemblance to the original story. Boully’s book retells the tale through the lens of memory, bringing the subtext of sexual and adulthood anxieties into the foreground. Tiger Lily, who competes for Peter’s attentions in the source text, is here even more overtly sexual, “her thong all encrusted with the little shells from the seashore…she doesn’t shave her pubes, and they’re all sticking out and out.” Wendy, who, as in the book, plays house with Peter in a kind of mock-marriage, wants a “marriage made more real” and is regularly associated with images of growing, pregnancy, and menstruation.

Also brought to the fore are the intentional and unintentional cruelties of Peter, about whom we are told: “this much is ever so real; this much isn't make-believe. Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes. He can do a great deal to you. For example, he can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life..."

Read the rest of the Hazelton's review at Devil's Lake, published by the good folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And follow this link to read more about--perhaps even to purchase!--Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.

Huffington Post and Lantern Review examine, praise Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

At The Huffington Post, poet and attorney Seth Abramson provides a succinct, spot-on review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (along with brief reviews of some other favorite books of ours, including Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Ariana Reines's Mercury).

Writes Abramson:

Peter Pan was a postmodern tour de force written at the height of Modernism -- and if the very best collections of literary art at least gesture toward their immediate influences, this is undoubtedly the contemporary re-treatment that Peter Pan deserves. Boully has captured the darkness of Barrie's text, and in elevating its inter- and sub-textualities to the level of discourse she illuminates and reinvigorates her source material without sacrificing any of its creepiness, wonder, or violence. Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming.

Read all of Abramson's  December 2011 Contemporary Poetry Reviews

At The Lantern Review, Jai Arun Ravine provides a unique, probing, and ultimately fab review, locating not merely within the contexts of Boully's The Body and J.M. Barrie's "source text," Peter and Wendy, and drawing parallels with Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003) and Padcha Tuntha-obas’ Trespasses (O Books, 2006).

Here are a couple excerpts:

“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover....

Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.

The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches.

Read the full review.

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