Carol Novack - Think Alice in Wonderland on acid simultaneously dancing with Tristan Tzara, Rimbaud, Oedipus, Pandora, Gertrude Stein, Proust, Kerouac

Carol Novack, Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, Spuyten Duyvil, 2010.

“THE most seductive, original, impacting work I have seen for years. A fascinating combination of Kerouacian street-talk plus a trip through the museum of Modern Art in Chicago, plus a nod-off to Kosty's furthest out experimentalism. Magnifique!” - Hugh Fox

“She has the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, like those musicians who can specify the hertz of birds and burps. Uncanny tympani!” - Tom Bradley

"Carol Novack’s Giraffes in Hiding mirrors our weltanschauung by using its own language against it or by using its own language to pry open the circus hidden within it. If we say the world is insane or we say the world is a manic whirl, Novack embraces manic insanity with a great hug of laughter. She flings images, characters, ideas, and language around until they all, finally losing, - no, abandoning - their moorings, collide, crash, ka-bang one into another creating nuclear reactions of the non-sense that is even Emily Dickinson’s “divine sense,” although Novack would certainly hurl those two words (and that idea) against each other until they radiated. To read this book is to bring the giraffes out of hiding!" - Martin Nakell

"In Giraffes in Hiding 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, subtitled The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack, 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

“Carol Novack is a conundrum to literary editors whose ideas of poetry and fiction as forms are rigid. To such editors, Novack might say, as one of her personae does, ‘Your imagination has closed walls.’ The best term for Novack’s typical literary form— flash fiction qua prose poem qua fusion—is Novack’s own, invention. Her eloquent inventions are witty, lyrical, and new, even as they reinvent the themes of family, myth, art, and self. The crux of Novack’s art is her imaginative power to bring alternate realities to vibrant life.” - Larissa Shmailo

“She’s great at creating a Freudian cage, & trapping the reader in it. 'Tis very powerful.” - Rae Desmond Jones

Read Meet Author: Carol Novack