Village cats, sunning on the stones in front of Église Saint-Thyrse; billboards for verveine, driving the N88 towards Le Puy; the beach in Saint Victoire sur Loire (where the café’s moules et frites are stunningly good) or the spun-sugar Baby Yoda sculpture at the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie in Yssingeaux. So much about the month I spent in and around Bas-en-Basset, France over the summer of 2023 crosses my mind every day. Yet mostly what I feel when I think about those days is the wise gaze of a woodcut portrait of a Mother St. John Fontbonne, borne Jeanne Fontbonne, in whose childhood home I had the privilege of staying. Fontbonne was, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “one tough nun,” though what she accomplished and endured as a religious in eighteenth and nineteenth century France puts any Infinite Jest subplot to shame. Saved from the guillotine by the capture of Robespierre? Disappointed not to have been able to serve as a martyr for God? Oui et oui.
These sonnets are loosely inspired by the life of Fontbonne, her relationship to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet as well as to her blood sister. I drafted them in blurry pencil with the shutters open and rooftop cats across the rue in clear view. They were always sonnets, but they became a crown in revision—a broken crown, really, because they cared little for metrical rules and they reflect, probably, my poor handling of French. C’est la vie.
JoAnna Novak latest book Domestirexia: Poems was published by Soft Skull in 2024. She is the author of the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood. Novak’s short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is also the author of the novel I Must Have You and three additional books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.
