Midwood

In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.

"At the heart of Midwood is a violent curiosity that details of the world are drawn into, reemerging changed." -- Karen Solie
"Jana Prikryl is a poet of unique gifts: unexpected images, ingenious syntax, and wide-ranging erudition." -- Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature
"[Prikryl's] most recent [book], Midwood, makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of her artistry..." -- Nathan Blansett - The Los Angeles Review of Books
"This is part of the pleasure of reading Prikryl’s poems, the sense of exhilaration that accompanies their disintegrations, the little moments of free fall before something stable is once more given—some unexpected image or situation—to stand upon…" -- Dustin Illingworth - Poetry Foundation

Jana Prikryl's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, where she works as a senior editor. Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Canada from the age of six, she now lives in New York City.

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