Domestirexia

Description

A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways

Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of “domestic” and “anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home.

Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to.

Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.“Mysterious and rich with allusions, the poems in Domestirexia feel physically embroidered, as if I could run my fingers over them and feel densely woven thread. This tactility has everything to do with how Novak writes desire, and also with her wildly inventive, knotty, rococo verse. I think of Sylvia Plath listening to Joanna Newsom while assembling a bouquet in Wonderland. This is an exquisite and rare collection of poetry that feels magically out of time.” —Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts

“These marvelous poems—tweezed and plucked of any stray words, hellbent on singing incantations that Lucie Brock-Broido, Alberto Giacometti, Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and the ascetic, piggy darlings of subreddit catacomb-Edens would adore—get up to mischief that nourish me with every read. Domestirexia is an astonishing pleasure dome of lyric cake, all verve and scrumptious compression.” ––Greg Wrenn, author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis and Centaur

“Bladed and close, Domestirexia shivers with the intimacy of nightmares, and speaks with the authority of experience. Novak’s ‘forcefields of intimacy’ metabolize Sexton, Plath, and Trakl into darkly sexual fables of addiction, climate crisis, and financialization. Ghostly mothers loom over the book’s narratives and confessions, as the senseless fecundity of the natural world unsettles these speakers’ relationships to their bodies and to reason itself. Madness is never far in these tightly voiced, sometimes sing-song charms. Here are lines that vibrate with the hair-raising precision of the ‘needle on nipple,’ poems that wriggle and teem with life and its sense data—razored down to eerie, tilting monuments by Novak’s exacting art.” ––Noah Warren, author of The Complete Stories and Destroyer in the GlassJoAnna Novak’s memoir Contradiction Days was published by Catapult in July 2023. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.US

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