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A Night of Poetry featuring JoAnna Novak, Eileen G’Sell & Safa Khatib
October 24 @ 6:00 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books, and also streamed live to this event page and to Left Bank Book’s YouTube page.
Join us as we welcome three fantastic local poets JoAnna Novak, Eileen G’Sell, and Safa Khatib to share their new work.
EVENT INFO
- Books available from Left Bank Books
- Curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, and shipping available
- RSVP is encouraged
ABOUT THE BOOKS
DOMESTIREXIA: POEMS
by JoAnna Novak
Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to.
FRANCOFILAMENTS
by Eileen G’Sell
Vacillating between prose and verse, Francofilaments presents a varied sojourn through a woman’s trials and tribulations as reimagined, and filtered through, French culture and film. Several poems are based on, or excerpt from, interviews G’Sell conducted with French or French-speaking actors and filmmakers—including Juliette Binoche, Celine Sciamma, and Isabelle Huppert—while others excerpt from an extensive list of reviews and essays published on Francophone cinema. In investigating Francophilia, G’Sell likewise plumbs the depths of national, gendered, and racial identity. While her background as a critic informs many of these poems, the collection is also based in part on her experience as a single woman in her thirties—chronicling romantic (mis)adventures as well as orbiting more serious themes around sexuality, mortality, and pregnancy loss. This volume is a cinematic excavation of interiority—the author’s, but also that which we see and hear onscreen.”
ABOUT THE POETS
JoAnna Novak‘s memoir Contradiction Days was published by Catapult in July 2023. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three 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.
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and critic with recent contributions to Poetry, Oversound, Hyperallergic, The Baffler, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2023, she received the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism. Her second volume of poetry, Francofilaments, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in late 2024; in 2025, her first nonfiction book, Lipstick, will be published as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Safa Khatib is a writer and teacher living in St. Louis. She is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection A Dress of Locusts (Bloomsbury 2025).
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
