Domestirexia

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DOMESTIREXIA

“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 Glass