These marvelous poems get up to mischief that nourishes 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
“JoAnna Novak’s DOMESTIREXIA oscillates through the thinking and lush pathology of the late-capital domestic subject. Novak’s voice makes material out of her linguistic virtuosity, and makes it look easy, flicking away inventive and unexpected phrases as easily as they come, to make space for the next. DOMESTIREXIA isn’t a claustrophobic domestica however, the speaker’s mind-palace is decadent, nearly infinite, and the atmosphere builds,like a golden era film from Hollywood, where the confident female lead in the noir is playing with a knife, playing with the co-lead “Show me proof, Painboy,” she said. “Show me.” I loved this book, and you will too. ”
DOMESTIREXIA is sleight of hand, light on its feet – yet it’s a feat of gravitas, a “patina ballerina” spinning to a music box playing at a frequency we’d been listening to all the time, yet we hadn’t been attuned to until now. The deft magic trick of this collection is like the paradox of no-makeup makeup (“She frosted her face like a naked cake”): the subtle illusions in plain sight carefully curate this world to be more natural than nature. Novak oscillates with a virtuosic bravura from flowers (a garden of live flowers addressing itself) to flour (the artisanal artistic aesthetic - “a cake for Monet / a cake for Bosch … cake Cassatt”). DOMESTIREXIA has a hunger for domesticity and familiarity tangled into a wild hybrid music that, in ouroboros loop, self-cannibalizes and rises out of its own ashes. The speaker might cheat at solitaire (a “dazzling / regression”), but language doesn’t lie. Indeed, language makes strange bedfellows that, once joined together in whatever logic binds them, forever echo each other. Novak, a master list-maker in the tradition of Inger Christensen and Harryette Mullen, pares sparely yet exuberantly, pairing words and phrases – “German novella, Jewish novelist / four-way stop, off-leash dog”; “an urn and a plot / steak and champagne” – to lock lips, or breathe words into each others’ mouths, or simply coexist in their own lonely orbits. “Gold is / stable; so am I,” declares the speaker, yet the line break mid-phrase and the tenuous semicolon joining these two halves together shake the veneer of stability. The ignis fatuus scatters gold leaf along the path. Nothing gold can stay; only the gold survive.
–Adrienne Raphel, Author of of Our Dark Academia, Thinking Outside the Box, and What Was It For
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."