Review by Booklist Review
The title of Boulay's first book of poetry refers to popular YouTube videos in which wild red foxes jump and play on the black elastic surfaces so common in suburban backyards. While her titular poem describes the arc of the animals' slim, silky bodies as they twist and bounce, other poems in this impressionistic, slender volume also refer to media beyond the printed page, most notably the work of such artists as sculptor Louise Nevelson and painter Cy Twombly. Boulay matches the artistic intensity of these inspirations by composing complex lyrics and tableaux of rich imagery, from a startling, drenched corpse (a man splayed on the pavement, / his wet shadow dripping), to an animated, equine palette (Gold palomino, black Morgan, a huff and a cirrus / of steam), and bright, vivacious botany (Cluster of green bananas with a purple flower). Boulay is at her best when blending visual and aural impressions, as with pale carrots, wax apples and a blundering june bug. An excellent debut by an important counterpart to poets Adam Fitzgerald and Dana Goodyear.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Boulay's debut collection artfully negotiates the interplay between the natural and man-made worlds, presenting a lyric speaker searching for an authentic position in her contemporary surroundings. The very human issues of want, lack, and desire litter these nature obsessed pages. "Want is the old fairy tale:/ trying to carry the sea in a sieve," she writes in "Fleet," "Losing too is still ours." Boulay narrowly steers these poems from the pastoral, always mitigating the natural world through the human: a shark attack in John Singleton Copley's painting, "Watson and the Shark"; "Catching the Praying Mantis" indoors; and reading about moths on a smartphone while simultaneously attracting them in the poem "Reading in Bed." The poems have a quiet, meandering voice that presses back against anything easy or sensational. "I wish/ I didn't have to be over or under all the time,/ just whelmed, not false and not true," she writes in "False Hellebore," and this is often her effect on the reader. Boulay presents with an extremely even hand, but her questions address the subtle, difficult, and inconclusive elements of everyday life: "What I want is folded up somewhere,/ or buried, or slipped under the sea. I have everything/ else, everything everything. O fox,/ is this joy?" (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
