ISBN 9781733408219

A redacted atlas of longing, a transcontinental tour guided by eros, Abeyance, North America is an exploration of submission and desire. Moving between real and imaginary spaces, the poems comprise a travelogue both geographical and emotional. Novak interrogates the ways in which place can amplify the erotic, and how fantasies can interrupt or alter landscapes.

JoAnna Novak is the author of the novel I Must Have You and the book-length poem Noirmania. Her work has appeared widely, in publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, BOMB, Slate, and Guernica. She is a founding editor of Tammy, a literary journal and press. 

I would be only a mouth

and you could watch me

rook in your lap, another country

instead of fixing my bed

you

crawling up my throat

far from the street where I live.

"I drank up JoAnna Novak’s Abeyance, North America in one ecstatic gulp. What delicious language play, what playful ingenuity, what romance! This book is sexy and these poems feel good in my mouth."

—Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment,The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA

“Maybe what Novak offers is an ink-sputtered, blood-marked, chewed, dog-soothed, mutter-fluffed, shoe-bored, convertible couch on which to lie around and dream up seeking and satisfying appetites. As if Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin could time travel into our times with a bit more of a knack for word working upon word, a little more decadence-delight and more interest in the physiology of appetite for another person's body. Novak’s book is full of her prayers......a bit uncomfortable, / but excited.”

—Dara Wier, author of You Good Thing, Reverse Rapture, and in the still of the night

“The tremor of these observations drives through us and under our moving feet. This poetry is what I have been waiting for and think maybe you have been too! The geography is tenfold what we had imagined! There are spaces JoAnna Novak creates in these pages as whole, complete transfigurations, the new frame on the world we thought we knew.” 

—CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

“Abeyance, North America is a candescent, wrought collection that feels through the restlessness of pure desire, how it moves both ‘backward in a blizzard,’ and forward obsessively trying to attach itself to anything and everything. Where is desire located? Is the body a ledge, a bookshelf, a devil, an animal? Like Barthes’s A Lovers Discourse, these poems invite us to understand that the erotic is frantic, pulled in multiple directions, that it doesn’t know if it wants to climb a forty-foot date palm or soak in a hotel’s hot tub. But perhaps like language itself, in the end, desire has no true home and in order for it to stay alive, it has to keep moving and these poems give us beautiful glimpses of that movement.” 

—Sandra Simonds, author of Atopia

“‘I would be only a mouth,’ JoAnna Novak begins, reminding us that abeyance is derived from the Anglo-Norman and Old French abaer, meaning to gape, to open (the mouth) wide, to expect, to wait for impatiently . . . in these stunningly passionate dispatches, Novak wrenches, retools, retrofits poetry’s primary sequence. Lines like ‘For the punctuation of a heart / is small and sticky and jealous’ conjure the orthographic, sensual, and rhetorical in new scales and dimensions: it’s such pleasure to watch these poems defiantly hoist novel tones and registers, fresh scenes of luxury and disturbance, even a far-out crystal, from the embers of Petrarch and Sidney. Oscillating within and way beyond obsession, the poems perform amazing acrobatics, here consenting to and there overturning the subdom hierarchies of love and poetry. Abeyance isn’t just latency or longing, but, in legal discourse, unclaimedness—waiting for an owner: desire’s law is formal, fantastical, reiterative, always striving toward embodiment. In Abeyance, North America JoAnna Novak proves herself an intrepid geographer, lexicographer, outlaw, and inheritor of poetry’s power to say the truths of human want.” 

—Hannah Brooks-Motl, author of Earth, M, and The New Years