JoAnna Novak : on Une Couronne Cassée Pour Ma Sœur

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Amanda Earl : what poems do in a few above/ground press 2021 chapbooks

 

 

 

 

1. evoke dreams

The Northerners by Benjamin Niespodziany is “an ekphrastic sequence written while  watching the Dutch film De Noorderlingen (1992)  directed  by  Alex  van  Warmerdam.” I haven’t seen the film, but I enjoyed this sequence very much. I did the same sort of thing while watching Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and it’s published in Kiki, my poetry book with Chaudiere Books (now with Invisible Publishing). I love the minimalism of this sequence, the fragments, and the fact that some of the poems “appeared as daydreams written on post-it notes.” There’s a fairy tale quality to the sequence. There are evocative lines, such as “He houses the dark” when writing about someone called “the forester” from the film I would think. You know how your dreams seem completely logical while you’re dreaming? I felt that here. Like I was dreaming too.

2. mesmerize through accumulatory sentences

In Yesterday’s Tigers by Mayan Godmaire, the sentences start out small and build into complex images and structures. I delighted in these poems, some were haibun, I believe. I loved the call to the senses. I don’t know about you but since the pandemic, my world has been increasingly reduced to screens, so I welcome any opportunity to engage with the senses. I enjoyed the way occasional sentences in French appeared. Switching languages in a poem changes its rhythm and pace. I love the way Persephone is linked throughout and to the land. The lines in italics come from Jim Morrison songs and Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and work well with the text. I’d like to read more of Godmaire’s writing.

3. play with geometry

Andrew Brenza Geometric Mantra is intriguing. Brenza works with and against the grid  in these digital visual poems. Some of the words are readable and some are not. He begins with a maze at the start of a sentence, followed by mirages and mirror images. The work shifts into distortions and breakages as the mirror breaks into shards of reflections becoming kaleidoscopic and fading. There is an error to remember, darkness and snow, letters that meander and link or bunch together like magnetic fuzzy iron filings in a magnetic field experiment. There is a sad sea. I can read each one of these poems and my mind begins to wander too, taking me all over the place from Eurydice’s broken mirror (once more a Cocteau reference) to the suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, to this odd little toy I had as a child that used a magnet to collect filings beneath a plastic sheet…None of this was the author’s intent, but as a writer, I always want my work to lead outward and inward. So it’s a compliment. I know these were probably great fun to make.

Katie O’Brien’s Micro Moonlights plays with musical notation in a similar way. Some of the titles come from or were inspired by Beethoven. This work also plays with the grid, here the sheet of music, sometimes horizontal or vertical or at a slant, and the notes, sometimes repeated, sometimes dancing off the sheet, sometimes layered into a tower of song, to reference Leonard Cohen for my own entertainment, or a big tangled up pile of cacophony. I would like to hear these played on a piano.  

4. make me ache with envy

In Less Dream N.W. Lea makes poems that ripple across my lake of loneliness, as his work always does for me. They quietly sing flaw. Everything at Once is a mantra that I’ll keep on my wall. There’s something so humble about this work, yet it also astonishes with these unique lines that feel like truths for me. “the blackbirds in the bare maple/are little adorable portals/into Void. [from Void].

Jason Christie’s Bridges and burn is a thoughtful, humorous and sometimes wry sequence that plays with the contradictions between the natural world and the human world as we try to survive  late capitalism. It’s been the subject of much of Christie’s work especially his most recent and brilliant collection, Cursed Objects (Coach House Books, 2019. “In the meantime, the tree grows like a graphic expression of a kind of rough music performed by the ants.” Hell yeah.

THE OCEANDWELLER by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi and translated by Khashayar Mohammadi is a gorgeous work. “bitter nights had sedimented underneath our nails”

There is acacia entering a kitchen window, white like a bride. There is a downpour, two telephone conversations mingled. There is pain: “its strange / how pain resembles words / if inspected from close range / its as if words are constructed by pain” – “hide your wings”

I love that above/ground press publishes translations, not something I’ve seen too often in the micropress universe. I appreciated being introduced to Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s work, which I would likely never have read because I don’t speak Farsi.

5. have me leaping around

JoAnna Novak’s Knife with Oral Greed opens with an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem, Hansel and Gretel from Sexton’s Transformations, which I hadn’t heard about before and will now read.

Knife with Oral Greed is a great title, by the way, and perhaps refers to an ancient Finnish tale, Kullervo, based on a very shallow Google search. Makes me think of Freudian analysis – orality.

This is a minimal sequence, spare of colour (white, red, silver), with unusual words like “tessarae,”: tessarae are small, cut stones used in mosaics as early as the third or fourth century. A “cuchillo” is a Spanish word for knife. I do not know what a “peach leo” is but I like it.

I am enamored by all the textures in this sequence: wax, silk, silver, oil, foam, white flowers, cake, snakes, wine, flypaper…

There’s a small American perfumery called “For Strange Women,” I have only learned about this month. The descriptions of the perfumes were so enticing, I had to purchase a solid perfume called Fireside Story. This work is well-written and strange, and that is a compliment. It feels like a dream. There are some reversals where objects perform actions that I’ve seen in some Canadian contemporary surrealist-ish poetry.

Looking at Novak’s site, I notice Noirmania, a poetry collection that is described by Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book describes as “part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama.” I’m intrigued. I feel like this intensity that is described is restrained in Knife with Oral Greed, but it’s there, beneath the skin, in the veins…

And of course, I have to look up Göransson, who is a poet, translator, professor and editor. I immediately follow him on Twitter. I liked his use of “necroglamorous.” This leads me to this fantastic poem published on Poetry Daily, “Summer (excerpt) which blends English with another language that I don’t know so I can’t name it and is heavy with texture and intense too. Then I go to his site and read a bit from an interview he did where he’s quoted as saying he wants to drown in poetry. I adore this. That’s what I’m here for.

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a polyamorous pansexual feminist cis-gendered poetesse, the fallen angel of AngelHousePress and the managing editor of Bywords.ca, and that’s all she wants to mention in her bio right now. More info: AmandEarl.com; Adoring fans: https://linktr.ee/amandaearl.

 

 

JoAnna Novak : Two poems

Getup

How he forks from the bowl, bar breath, stern son, still doe-eyes and buck jaw, stabbing gnocchi at the counter. Her love is all over him, but really: Are you finishing that? O she loves him, she’s freaking, the meat can be frozen, dishes washed, Dawned, and drip-dried—ho! No, no. Monsieur Moisture Particle patrols the party. Poor Mother. Poor Bambi. Where is her will? Where is the world? She scours the water of Lake Katherine, clobbers a batch of scones. Appled, walnut-littered, these muffins, these biscuits, these pupbones, lookee look—she flaunts the powdered milk. Have you made a pumpkin pie with real pumpkin? All morning, the phone’s bacteria on her cheek. No, she shouldn’t have gone to vote. Hacking, like her boy at the bar. Shooting Bora Bora Fireballs. His quadrants of influence, the squares of his nature, the spiky crown of a virus. To be lonely. To be close. Close enough to come home. To start upset, worsen, get worse, to pile and pile. Her son held his grandmother’s hand when she died. Mothering all on her own. Empty seashell: ventilator. And this morning on the phone, she hunted for a credit, $50 back on her Nordstrom. Finally a price-drop on the funeral dress.

Willows

Dust in his ears, dust in the earth, dust on the brush, dust on the blow, dust I loved, dust the sky, dust imperil, dust throughout, dust the curio, dust the cage, dust the animals, dust the cork, dust the scrape, dust the paws, dust the mutter, dust the snout, the grape, the musk, the shore, the row, dust autonomy, dust along, dust at night, dust of morn, dust for purpose, dust for joy, dust a plot, dust in weeds and dust in wine, dust the fly and dust the mole, dust the memory flooded with mud, dust suspected, dust expunged, dust I work, dust the mores, dust a box, dust a map, dust a boot red and green, dust I lived, dust I wanted, dust the crust, dust the story-crinkling corners, dust the mole snickering in the garden, dust the veins and dust the roots and dust the cracks and dust the nerve, dust the father’s bearded flannel, dust a scripter, dusty gospel, dusted hominy, dusting meal, dust of greens and dust of hocks and dust of yams and dust of purply pie, ube, last chapter.

JoAnna Novak is the author of the novel I Must Have You and two books of poetry: Noirmania and Abeyance, North America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Fence, Guernica, AGNI, BOMB, and other publications. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy, and teaches in the MFA program at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles.