Domestirexia: Poems [Paperback]

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. Propulsive . . . Thanks to Novak’s vivid language, these pages overflow with life’s complexities, terrors, and fragmentations. —Publishers Weekly

Novak moves through the tensions of domestic as subject—the disappointments, the distractions, mundanities, degrees and difficulties—echoing the cultural depiction of domestic as some kind of punishment, while simultaneously attempting to allow the flowing possibilities and delights of such space for turning, becoming . . . Her poems offer themselves as sharp ellipses, running blood across lines. —Rob Mclennan

“JoAnna Novak's DOMESTIREXIA oscillates through tlã7