Laps by JoAnna Novak
White bread sandwiching pickles and snoot. The nostrils, twin commas. Looks fine, no bristles. If I blink, the clouds in the afternoon sky spell shapes.
“Tell me what this tastes like,” you say.
“Eat it yourself.”
The bite heats an oily whisper.
In these exquisite stories, as edgy as they are heart-rending, JoAnna Novak explores the bottomless appetites of girls; on the verge of becoming women, her characters crave everything from food to love to complete transformation. Laps is a dark love song to desire. No one writes about hunger quite like JoAnna Novak does.
—Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny.
76 pages, handmade and numbered • 2014
White bread sandwiching pickles and snoot. The nostrils, twin commas. Looks fine, no bristles. If I blink, the clouds in the afternoon sky spell shapes.
“Tell me what this tastes like,” you say.
“Eat it yourself.”
The bite heats an oily whisper.
In these exquisite stories, as edgy as they are heart-rending, JoAnna Novak explores the bottomless appetites of girls; on the verge of becoming women, her characters crave everything from food to love to complete transformation. Laps is a dark love song to desire. No one writes about hunger quite like JoAnna Novak does.
—Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny.
76 pages, handmade and numbered • 2014
White bread sandwiching pickles and snoot. The nostrils, twin commas. Looks fine, no bristles. If I blink, the clouds in the afternoon sky spell shapes.
“Tell me what this tastes like,” you say.
“Eat it yourself.”
The bite heats an oily whisper.
In these exquisite stories, as edgy as they are heart-rending, JoAnna Novak explores the bottomless appetites of girls; on the verge of becoming women, her characters crave everything from food to love to complete transformation. Laps is a dark love song to desire. No one writes about hunger quite like JoAnna Novak does.
—Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny.
76 pages, handmade and numbered • 2014
JoAnna Novak is the Pushcart-Prize-nominated author of Something Real (dancing girl press, 2011), a prose chapbook. She holds an MFA from Washington University and an MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals such as DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Pank, Hobart, Los Angeles Review, and Web Conjunctions, among others. With Thomas Cook and Tyler Flynn Dorholt, she publishes Tammy, a journal of poetry and prose. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is working on a memoir.