Thank you.
Although it kind of creeps me out to think of my daughter
as a publication.
I don't think I can put her on my CV at the very least.
Anyway thank you so much to Jenny for coming down
and to everyone here again tonight.
So it's awesome to see this many people at a reading.
And thank you also to the English department,
which is co-sponsoring this event through the Convergences
Series this year.
And the theme this year is the body.
And Jenny's first book is in fact The Body.
And I think we'll probably hear a little bit about the body
in her work tonight.
So as I've been doing before I'm pitching these introductions
as lessons in hybridity, so this is number three.
Jenny Boully.
A hybrid is a seamed thing that lives above and subsists
on the fire of seam, itself, where
the Earth's crust is thinnest and what's below
can serve as fuel.
Hybrid feeds on seam or the steam
that emanates from cracks when something underneath gets
superheated and must at last emerge.
Those people are excited about hybridity.
As they should be.
Jenny Boully's work is self-evidently seamed.
If all text is a body, and I believe that it is,
then Jenny Boully's drawn to where that body splits and does
not mend and becomes multiple.
Its open wounds, its amputations,
a little voice floating in a field of voice,
its sutures, its erasures.
See for instance her first book, The Body,
footnotes in an absent text.
See for instance her Not Merely Because
of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them,
a double narrative of Peter Pan, one
floating atop the other like concentric
descending tectonic plates.
See also The Book of Beginnings and Endings, which
includes just those with the middles
of the books eviscerated.
Or consider her newest book and her first that
includes actual lineated poems which we have up here:
Of the Mismatched Teacups, of the Single Serving Spoons:
a Book of Failures.
What else but a hybrid would present a book of failures,
offering them up collected to be dissected,
seams and weaknesses and all.
Even her bio suggests the split.
Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas.
She's not fully either nor both, exactly.
Not Thai nor Texan, but somewhere in the split between.
Not located so much as dislocated, as in her essay
A Short Essay on Being in which she writes about her Thainess
in Texas.
"You don't show others their errors.
You let them eventually come to learn the errors of their ways
and have them come to you for forgiveness later."
That is, you layer.
You lay in wait, you take what's given.
For a long time, you might burn or eventually turn to stone.
So here's the lesson.
Find a seam and occupy it.
Take strength from it like a salamander.
I mean the fire lizard from myth,
not the cute, wet thing that sings of slime.
And seam I mean a crack in language or in genre or in form
where there is some pressure.
Or find a pair of seams like the ones
that run in lines down the sides of jeans, keeping our donut
lit up thighs from bursting out like overeating eels.
Once you have your seam, then straddle it.
But when first you find your seam,
it might feel like there's nothing there.
Still ask yourself, what is it that you do
that is least like the others?
How are you best an irritant?
And to whom?
Art's not easy.
It should produce some friction.
If it doesn't threaten someone somewhere,
then you're doing something wrong.
Emphasize that little heat you feel and try to kindle it.
See what that means and why others resist.
Open up your seam, slip a finger inside, and then next a hand.
It should feel warm and dark, long unused to light.
With your hand inside of it, can you feel its pulse?
That means there's something moving, living here.
This is your seam.
There are others like it, but this one's yours alone.
What is it abut?
What does it hold closed?
Slip yourself inside completely and see
what's there, what moves against your feet
when you're underneath.
That is, your work is now to understand these pressures
and give your voice to them, to write from it, to make
this slip a home, to describe its movements well,
to invite others there, to let it close above you
at your own risk only.
In that case, you might have to find a different exit.
Pliny the Elder tells us that the salamander, "an animal
like a lizard in shape and with a body
starred all over never comes out except during heavy showers
and disappears the moment it becomes fine.
It spits forth a milky matter from its mouth
and whatever part of the human body is touched with this
all the hair falls off and the part assumes
the appearance of leprosy."
My favorite monster manual assigns this hybrid beast
a copper colored head and torso with yellow, glowing eyes.
Its lair is typically at least 500 degrees and such treasure
as there is found there will be the sort to survive such heat.
Well, what treasure we find in Jenny Boully's work
has survived such heat and, in fact, subsists on it.
To that end, before I am set aflame for boring you,
I give you Jenny Boully.