spuytenduyvil

The collection adheres to an aesthetic coherence characterized by compositional  madness and linguistic play; the varieties of form this coherence encompasses are astounding.

     Megan Milks in Rain Taxi

 

"It is with a good measure of irony that Carol Novack's first full-length collection, Giraffes in Hiding, is subtitled The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack. The collection consists of over forty genre-bending pieces that hardly amount to the kind of inspirational narratives with which we often associate memoir.

      from American Book Review

 

Let’s say we are standing at the edge of an ocean (there are many fish in Giraffes in Hiding; the ocean is a convenient and fitting image) and dotted out across the distance are forty-two islands, forty-two worlds spread along a space-time continuum and forming a mythical history of Novack, whom we must consider the Goddess of this watery world.

      review at Necessary Fiction

 

Everything in this book is very structured and very attentive to the discipline of organizing and controlling the surreal.

     UnlikelyStories.org review

 

This shows that the book is more than a book, it’s a guide to the right side of the brain, a corpus callosum of creativity, a bridge from the dreadful drought to the land of the dead and back.

     Marcus Speh, Smashcake magazine

 

Carol Novack proves once again that she is the all-time champion of wild, wigged out, original prose/poetry and poetic prose. The first full-length collection of her work is a feast of fusions, inventions, myths, dreams, forms, and possibilities. There’s no one like Novack, and here she is at her best as she chases her ontological tail round and round the intelligible, unknown worlds of her subconscious (and ours). Think Alice in Wonderland on acid simultaneously dancing with Tristan Tzara, Rimbaud, Oedipus, Pandora, Gertrude Stein, Proust, Kerouac, and that weird kid next door who ate all of the heads off your Barbie Dolls and you’ll begin to get a feel for what she’s up to.

      Mary Mackey, author of Breaking The Fever et al.