Overview

"Vogue's Best Books of Summer 2021 ""Everyone had a clearer vision of my body than I did. It didn't feel as if my body was really mine..."" At age fourteen, Jonathan Wells weighs just sixty-seven pounds, triggering a scrutinizing persecution of his body that will follow him into adulthood. Upstate New York in the 1970s: A boy in preparatory day school suffers a harrowing attack by a teacher offended by his failure to put on weight. For the first time in his young life, Jonathan Wells is forced to question his right to take up space in the world. Jonathan's father, reading his weight as a clear and deeply concerning deficit of masculinity, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn't help, he has Jonathan seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming he is in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: the boy is simply too skinny. Jonathan's complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, unwittingly, plays a divisive role. As a result, Jonathan is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where he manages to establish an identity of his own among the child exiles and outcasts that make up the student body. And yet, his father's obsession follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space he has painstakingly won for himself. The critically acclaimed poet and author of the collection Debris, Jonathan Wells gives us a candid, powerful, and quietly humorous memoir about the universal exploration of adolescence and self-image, the frailty of masculinity, and all the places we seek comfort in a world that tries to define us."

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9781733540193

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Reviews

The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love. -Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me Praise for Jonathan Wells's previous work: I admire the directness of the writing, the plain style pushing the boundaries of the strange, what the Beowulf poet calls 'the wyrd'....The quality of direct observation in the poems verifies the style, and gives the subjects real gravitas. -Tom Sleigh In this eloquent book of poems, Jonathan Wells meditates on the vast interconnectedness of personal relationships, discovering human unities beneath the surfaces of our complex and varied experiences of love, mortality, and poetry. Meditative, intimate, and precise, Wells finds insight in such surprising places, 'a yardman's / mitt open-fisted on a post like an owl's glower,' the way the ankles of wading deer 'split the river into twelve new streams.' The Man with Many Pens is a musically rich and moving collection, one I will return to with pleasure. -Kevin Prufer In Jonathan Wells's new book, love has as many arms as Shiva. Limitless, transcending, unchanging and protean, the poems capture the energy of Eros for both its terror and tenderness. Luckily for us, Wells has the formal discipline and restraint to control such a whirlwind. This is a terrific book, serious, bemused, generous, revealing the most complicated facets of our human connections. -Erin Belieu These poems go from 0 to 60 in under 1.5 seconds, and they can turn on a dime, each word lined up, steaming, shimmering, tilting through smoke and tinsel, signal towers, 'shingled light', to where 'naked beech trees knit/ a fence to keep time and chance away'. Jonathan Wells' Train Dance transports the reader to destinations 'higher than the minds of the stars' geometers'. -Dorianne Laux Charting the many stations and terminals of any passage through a life, from awe of first encounters to those powerful mysteries of adult passage, Jonathan Wells is always an eloquent, meditative, and lyrical guide. -David St. John At a moment in history when simply breathing is fraught with social and political implications, to be inspired, that is, to breathe in, implies a new metaphysics. Debris, Jonathan Wells's third poetry collection, invites us to 'inhale the page's fragrance and complete the scene,' as Wells does throughout this most inspired work. And in so doing, he breathes in a rich archive of literary culture, the debris of late capitalism, the emotional debris of human relationships, and the glorious debris of lived experience. Wells makes himself vulnerable to the world to remind us that the personal is political, yes, but the political takes up residence in the body in much the way these poems do, at a cellular and most intimate level. -Gregory Pardlo The sense of timelessness one finds in Jonathan Wells's Debris typically comes to us through translation, often from the position of exile, as if we require perspectives shot through the prism of another language to better see the lives we are in. As his speaker describes, 'An unexpected story moves me / toward the window. Is it mine / or the one about how the pylons / crumbled and the planks fell.'This book provides a mirror to the country in which we now reside, that has for so long been unrecognizable. -Cate Marvin Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace. -Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey With a poet's grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster-and about his tyrannical father's determination to transform his son's body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn't put it down. -Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess. -Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny - I mean, the real skinny - about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book. -David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace. -Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey With a poet's grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster-and about his tyrannical father's determination to transform his son's body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn't put it down. -Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess. -Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love. -Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny - I mean, the real skinny - about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book. -David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour One of the most vulnerable memoirs I've ever read, Jonathan Wells' Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970s and ;80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, lifelong harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them. -Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and he End of the Day Jonathan Wells was small as a child-short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events...The Skinny is gripping in its wonderful articulation of an underrepresented perspective on masculinity. -Foreword Review

The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love. -Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me Praise for Jonathan Wells's previous work: I admire the directness of the writing, the plain style pushing the boundaries of the strange, what the Beowulf poet calls 'the wyrd'....The quality of direct observation in the poems verifies the style, and gives the subjects real gravitas. -Tom Sleigh In this eloquent book of poems, Jonathan Wells meditates on the vast interconnectedness of personal relationships, discovering human unities beneath the surfaces of our complex and varied experiences of love, mortality, and poetry. Meditative, intimate, and precise, Wells finds insight in such surprising places, 'a yardman's / mitt open-fisted on a post like an owl's glower,' the way the ankles of wading deer 'split the river into twelve new streams.' The Man with Many Pens is a musically rich and moving collection, one I will return to with pleasure. -Kevin Prufer In Jonathan Wells's new book, love has as many arms as Shiva. Limitless, transcending, unchanging and protean, the poems capture the energy of Eros for both its terror and tenderness. Luckily for us, Wells has the formal discipline and restraint to control such a whirlwind. This is a terrific book, serious, bemused, generous, revealing the most complicated facets of our human connections. -Erin Belieu These poems go from 0 to 60 in under 1.5 seconds, and they can turn on a dime, each word lined up, steaming, shimmering, tilting through smoke and tinsel, signal towers, 'shingled light', to where 'naked beech trees knit/ a fence to keep time and chance away'. Jonathan Wells' Train Dance transports the reader to destinations 'higher than the minds of the stars' geometers'. -Dorianne Laux Charting the many stations and terminals of any passage through a life, from awe of first encounters to those powerful mysteries of adult passage, Jonathan Wells is always an eloquent, meditative, and lyrical guide. -David St. John At a moment in history when simply breathing is fraught with social and political implications, to be inspired, that is, to breathe in, implies a new metaphysics. Debris, Jonathan Wells's third poetry collection, invites us to 'inhale the page's fragrance and complete the scene,' as Wells does throughout this most inspired work. And in so doing, he breathes in a rich archive of literary culture, the debris of late capitalism, the emotional debris of human relationships, and the glorious debris of lived experience. Wells makes himself vulnerable to the world to remind us that the personal is political, yes, but the political takes up residence in the body in much the way these poems do, at a cellular and most intimate level. -Gregory Pardlo The sense of timelessness one finds in Jonathan Wells's Debris typically comes to us through translation, often from the position of exile, as if we require perspectives shot through the prism of another language to better see the lives we are in. As his speaker describes, 'An unexpected story moves me / toward the window. Is it mine / or the one about how the pylons / crumbled and the planks fell.'This book provides a mirror to the country in which we now reside, that has for so long been unrecognizable. -Cate Marvin One of the most vulnerable memoirs I've ever read, Jonathan Wells' Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970's and 80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, life-long harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them. -Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and he End of the Day Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace. -Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey With a poet's grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster-and about his tyrannical father's determination to transform his son's body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn't put it down. -Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess. -Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny - I mean, the real skinny - about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book. -David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour

Layer by layer, Jonathan Wells unravels the father-son knot in ways both troubling and uplifting. I was gripped by The Skinny, a remarkable portrait of the most tangled of relationships, written with a poet's eye and grace. -Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey With a poet's grace, Jonathan Wells has written a harrowing memoir about growing up severely underweight, about surviving sexual abuse by a schoolmaster-and about his tyrannical father's determination to transform his son's body into his own ideal of masculinity. The Skinny is a deeply haunting account of the lasting effects of emotional and physical bullying. I couldn't put it down. -Besty Bonner, The Book of Atlantis Black Here's the skinny on The Skinny. Wells has written a memoir that's lean without being gaunt, rawboned without being fleshless. It's an elegant work of curving contours and sharp-edged insight that captures a world long gone in voluptuous prose that nonetheless, is delightfully devoid of flab or excess. -Allen Kurzweil, author of Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year Old Bully The Skinny is a poignant account of what it is like to grow up as a diminutive boy in a world that prefers its men big and strong. In precise and poetic prose, Jonathan Wells explores the intersection of wealth, sexuality, and body image, peeling back the glittering layers of privilege, searching for his father's approval, and examining the assumptions made about male size in a culture of toxic masculinity. Ultimately, The Skinny is an illuminating memoir of one man's search for meaning, acceptance and love. -Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me Jonathan Wells's extraordinary coming-of-age memoir, The Skinny, is not only startling and heartbreaking, but each page seems somehow even more riveting and moving than the last. If you want the skinny - I mean, the real skinny - about growing up in a male body in this country it's time you read this deeply compelling and eminently wise new book. -David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour One of the most vulnerable memoirs I've ever read, Jonathan Wells' Skinny is the story of surviving the long, brutal gauntlet toward manhood that many boys who grew up in the 1970's and 80s endured. An important cautionary tale illuminating the devastating, life-long harm caused by rigid gender rules and the parents who try to enforce them. -Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and he End of the Day Jonathan Wells was small as a child-short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events...The Skinny is gripping in its wonderful articulation of an underrepresented perspective on masculinity. -Foreword Review

Author Information

Jonathan Wells has published three collections with Four Way Books: Debris, Train Dance, and The Man With Many Pens. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI and The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program and many other journals. The Skinny, is his first book of prose.

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