In taut percussive muscular language JoAnna Novak wields a fierce hammer. Here are tuff poems cast in a bright element in the 21st-century telling it like it is. It is sonic, strong, and wicked; and so good.
—Peter Gizzi, Author of Archeophonics
"Sweet candy and a finger wet with blood": JoAnna Novak's entrancing, disturbing and beautiful "cortége" is part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama. Noirmania puts Novak in conversation with poets like Cynthia Cruz, Danielle Pafunda and Lara Glenum, contemporary writers who, like the late Plath, explores the politics of the female body with a no-holds-barred intensity.
—JOHANNES GÖRANSSON, AUTHOR OF THE SUGAR BOOK
JoAnna Novak’s powerful voice in Noirmania comes to the world starving, wailing, wise ... I love this book for its poetry broken like glass into gorgeous colors. I love it for its strangeness that echoes my own, for its spaces to fall into, for the way it catches me, holds me, then flings me somewhere else. I am grateful this book is in the world.
—MAUREEN SEATON, AUTHOR OF SEX TALKS TO GIRLS
Noirmania surprises with its unlikely diction, a confessional dipped in silver and milk, a moony metropolis guided by an animal heart. Novak fathoms her space as a genius creature made of “nothing but metric.”