The Balloonists

by Eula Biss

Poetry.
"Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"
-Martin Espada.
"With deceptively quiet, unflinching compassion, Eula Biss records the perceptual wedges that cleave the self from its origins. The family history refracted here is mutable, notable, more gravid than grave. THE BALLOONISTS holds a fresh line on confession, biography, and the formal uses of information in poetry"
-Rebecca Wolff.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Biography, Read For School

72 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

About the author

Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches nonfiction writing, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, a new press dedicated to innovative nonfiction. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, The Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.

Reviews

[علی‌رضا · Rating 4 out of 5]

هفتم تیرماه ۱۴۰۳ | شب
‌
ترجمه‌ی نشر رایبد ایراداتی دارد. اما تنها ترجمه است. متن جدیدی‌ست و حرکت جدیدی هم هست. بهترین گونه‌ی این شکل از نوشتار به‌نظرم توی آثار «جان برجر» است. اما این‌جا یک تفاوت‌هایی دارد که نثرِ «یولا بیس» را مخصوص خودش می‌کند و خط افتراقی می‌اندازد میان خودش و برجر.

پی‌نوشت: پشت‌نویسِ ترجمه‌ی کتاب واقعا پشت‌نویسِ بی‌هوده‌ایست. تاریخ بالون‌سواری آخه؟

[Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Women now face the task not only of finding a form that can express what they have lived, but of finding a way to tell new stories about what they can live. Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the story of a revolutionary marriage has yet to be written. She writes that, "new definitions and a new reality about marriage must be not only lived but narrated." And must they be lived before they are narrated?" (p. 65)

The writing that is most valuable to me right now is the writing that carves out new space for real questions about how to live life (and relate within any moment of it) - space that does not reference form so much as make what it makes. This is an incredibly smart and moving book - beautiful, direct, articulate, investigational, unafraid. It moves you through your own unanswered self one moment at a time, granting enough poetic space to allow for the kind of absorption that real questions require. I feel like I have been looking for this book for a long time - so glad I found it. I should have known it would be this good - EB's essay "The Pain Scale" has been one of my favorite essays to teach for as long as I've known of it. I am really looking forward to her next book, which is coming out in February...

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bad complaint, maybe a refusal to meet the book on its own terms or to get my head around the goals of the lyric essay but I wish this were longer. The 2-6 sentence vignettes have a satisfying autonomy--a polaroid quality, ephemeral but firmly framed/bound--and work together often by counterpoint in the time of their perspective and subject to form a picture of Biss's childhood home and parents both as individuals and as a fracturing couple. The black box, balloonist material masks, for awhile, the direction of the narrative, while allowing her to speak to why it is we even want to know the gruesome details, the last things said before the crash while also providing, obliquely, a rationale for Biss' pointillist approach which is less concerned with the what of the last words between her parents and more with understanding who and why they were. The portraits that emerge are incredible.

I found the narrative less revealing when it started to weave in Biss' own relationships as an adult and the "are we are parents or the stories our parents tell us about being a person" question. There's an unfinished quality to it, and I'm not sure if it's a result of the pressure to make a lyric essay the length of a book of poems, the unfinished, unsure stakes nature of the relationships of a youngish writer, or me asking this to be more than it is. Either way, Biss weaves together the individual vignettes so seamlessly that it doesn't feel like on is actively juggling the pieces. The reader could handle more.


So hey also I found out Eula Biss is an editor at Essay press. It's all coming together.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection of interlinked microfiction (I keep seeing these referred to as prose poetry but that strikes me as not completely correct - it's more like vignettes).

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved loved loved this small book of creative non-fiction, memoir, poetry. What should I call it. I think Eula Biss is a one of a kind magician. I've read two of her books and one essay from another. I think her recent book about immunization won a National Book Award. If it didn't, it should have. She is the bravest, most honest, most complicated white writers dealing with privilege and racism and love and family that I know who's writing today.

[Kailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in the bathtub today. A moving meditation on how our relationships are and are not shaped by the relationships of our parents. Will the balloon make it all the way around the world? Are we using the tools properly? Will the kite fly away? A lot of metaphors that sometimes got jumbled up together, but I think that was the point.

[Sejal Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book before and enjoyed coming back to it. Eula's writing is spare, precise, poetic, and sharp. She has a new book of essays coming out next month I think from Graywolf and I'm very much looking forward to reading it.

[Athan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It strange to read about your own life. In this case, it was a voyeuristic thrill but also a shock of clarity that smashed through years of foggy, incomplete understandings of my parents divorce.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read Notes from No Man’s Land back in 2010, I knew I wanted to read this. I finally bought it and it is as good as I had hoped. It is also very layered and I am not sure I have understood all tha Biss is trying to tell me. Given that it is only 72 pages I plan to visit this essay again.

[Mallory DeVries · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because I've read so little poetry, I was unsure how to rate this or how it compares to similar works, but I enjoyed it. She describes the struggles of breaking free from the stories of our parents. The words are haunting and tug at your heart strings. A verse that really stood out to me:

My mother was in the bathtub crying and I was standing outside the door waiting, just in case she decided to slip her head under and keep it there. The other kids were upstairs. The problem was about money, of course. She was afraid she wouldn't have enough for us to eat.

[Brianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike her second book (which I read first), this book is much more interpretive. The stylization of the words leaves the reader open to a world beyond the words. You read it in small snippits and understand in pieces. How you put it together is up to you. I'm sure no two people would take the same message from the book, but each is valuable to themselves and to others if it's shared. I wish I could talk to others about their ideas of this book, because I know it can be more than how i see it.

[Amanda Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stories are only true if we believe them. Or if we live them. It is unclear where our parents' stories end and where our stories begin."

[Laura B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like Maggie Nelson, you'll love Eula Biss is what i'm learning. i love Biss's obsession with scales and measurement, and trying to figure out emotion and personal history against those metrics. a forever-favorite of mine, and this book proves exactly everything i love about her true. heartbreaking and beautiful examination of the internal world of a family, and of relationships, as well as the cycle they fall into. was so glad this wasn't just about hot air balloons, tbh. i feel like i'm going to revisit this with regularity. immediately wanted to recommend it to anyone going through a break-up especially, or working through the weird adult process of understanding your parents' relationships as potential mirrors of your own instead of just entities that exist outside of reality.

[Amanda Judd · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was . . . interesting. I recently won a poetry contest and the judge compared my poetry to that of Eula Biss in this particular collection. I don't see any similarities. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how this is poetry. It reads and feels more like a bunch of thoughts on different subjects almost randomly combined. Almost. There are areas where you can see the tie-in between thoughts or you see the follow-through when it circles back. There are some beautifully written lines. Exquisitely written lines! Those lines alone were worth the time to read the book.

If you are looking for traditional poetry, or even traditional modern poetry, you won't find it here. However, this book is thought-provoking, engaging, and disheartening.

[Kate Ringer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very poetic. I enjoyed the feeling of Biss's words on her parents' failed marriage washing over me as I waited for the day to begin.

"Dissertations have been written on The Effect of Parental Alienation Syndrome. Doctoral candidates have measured children of divorce on The Happiness Index. There have been studies using The Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale and The Adjustment Scale. But there has been no measure of The Level of Disillusionment with the Standard Story. There is no Trust in the Narrative Scale. There has been no study of the undercurrents of disbelief running through our lives. What if an entire generation were to reject their central story line?" (43).

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Are we going to keep living the same stories our parents lived?”

Eula Biss is one of my favorite writers, my final from her bibliography (for now), this is her first published book and very different from her other work. Told in vignettes similar to Bluets by Maggie Nelson or Upstream by Mary Oliver. The Balloonists chronicles the dissolution of the marriage of Biss’ parents, the aftermath, and falling in love for the first time. And shows just how hard it is to break out of those patterns we learn from our family.

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short book of prose poems. Small snippet narratives that revolve around the narrator's questions of relationships - her relationship with her father, mother, and a lover. She gives us moments that are poignant and yet unsentimental, and as a whole the pieces all work together -- you get a strong picture of the doubts that plague her surrounding marriage and family and relationships. I really liked this.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

going back and forth with the rating because i think this work is objectively well done and well thought out and i also like the use of metaphor and the language! however, it was a pretty depressing read and became repetitive the more i read on. it was also a bit difficult to connect to since it was solely about heterosexual relationships + it looked at gender through this cishet lens which i find uninteresting/boring. so i’d say it’s good, but maybe not for me!

[Francis Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love vignette story telling. It helps as an ADHD reader. Eula Bliss’ scripture stills captures human, familial, and relational threads to stitch together a scrapbook story of her life and her family. It’s relatable, delicate, intentional, and poetic. She does a fantastic job at marrying non-fiction and prose. It’s a book to write notes in the margins to then come back to years later and see what’s changed.

[Miya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in college. It is, perhaps, the single most influential book in my writing life. It is the book that showed me what creative nonfiction can really be. I returned to it recently, an old friend, and I am happy to say that it is just as wonderful as it was the first time I picked it up.

[Gabby Grinaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book is sad, but brilliant. I read through it in less than 24 hours. I couldn’t put it down. The way Biss weaves together the life of her parents and her relationships is beautiful and impactful. I loaned this book from a friend, but plan on buying it soon so I can reread it. I think it’ll definitely take a few reads to fully digest, but it’s worth it.

[Arabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biss writes with careful frenzied attention to tenderness and fragility. Juxtaposing the story of her parents and of her own relationship, it is a non-direct avowal to the stories we find ourselves in relation to our histories. I think this is a magnificent story, a poem in itself.

[Ranjani Sundar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bliss uses montages of memory strung together by the parallels between her parents' lives and her life in order to weave a coherent nonfiction narrative. A good read for anyone looking for an interesting take on emotions, plane crashes, and the struggle in relationships.

[jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastatingly beautiful and easily consumable. I gave this to a close friend upon her engagement (similar to how she gifted me Biss' On Immunity upon the birth of my daughter—still too cutting for me to make it all the way through).

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Eula Biss' layering of curiosity, stoicism, and reflections on parents and relationships here. I'm not even entirely sure that's what this book is about, but that hardly seems like the point.

[Silvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the mysterious weaving of the details of the “story”. Well written. Wished there had been a bit more information divulged about the “characters”.

[John LaPine · Rating 4 out of 5]

poetic/essayistic tale of romance, allegedly composed from journals with large chunks deleted. intriguing and lovely

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eula Biss runs a red thread through all her work. It's nuanced and startling and the last lines are pitch perfect. Her essay 'White Debt' in The New York Times: also very good.

[Camila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read part of it and still very beautiful

[Alexander Wolff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterfully crafted. However, I find the book to fall "flat." The slick style of writing, however, did not detract from my enjoyment of Biss' work.