Domestirexia
Poems
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- ¥1,800
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this propulsive fourth collection, Novak (New Life) explores the intersection of domestic life, new parenthood, and anorexic impulses, while enacting the tyrannical confines of the postpartum mind. The poems are agitated, full of sonic chatter as they make sense of the quotidian. "Highboy" asks, "What if simplicity saves nothing?/ If my monochrome chant is a red grunt?" Indeed, it is through wordplay that the book steadies itself, a kind of parish house of sound where the poet finds "all day long, the spread of history, goodness, the morning made me hungry, unstable, and talky." Much of this talk is channeled into litanies that attempt to control food and feelings, as in the muscular and quirky "Abundance": "making much of little ribbon brisket/ knish gnocchi/ rubber carrot,/ latex bone/ I chalked/ the rabbet day/ O Dei, sick present coughing blood carnations." Beyond the purview of home, "the rules of dividends cracks sidewalks, slanting the historic district," while inside, there are dinner parties to attend to. Thanks to Novak's vivid language, these pages overflow with life's complexities, terrors, and fragmentations.
