Contemporary Authors

• The After Party: Poems Tim Duggan Books (New York, NY), 2016

1. The after party : poems LCCN 2015037658 Type of material Book Personal name Prikryl, Jana, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The after party : poems / Jana Prikryl. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, 2016. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781101906231 (paperback) Links Cover image 9781101906231.jpg CALL NUMBER PS3616.R538 A6 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/21/surrendering-to-your-own-maneuvers/

  QUOTED: "'Thirty Thousand Islands' was ... a way for me to reckon with my enormous, openly sentimental debt to a place whose actual literary tradition I happen to feel little affinity for."
  "It’s about the fairly common experience of homelessness on planet Earth, in other words. And the place itself—this archipelago of pink rocky islands in a northern landscape, filled with pine trees and cottages—is a bit neither flesh nor fowl, neither land nor sea, so besides being very pretty it seems to ask what 'place' is, just how much earth—or local culture—is required for a place to serve as home."
  "I felt an urge to evoke that region and conjure its beauty, while humoring my own doubts (not total but persistent) about the uses of beauty in literature. Beauty is necessary in art, but I usually want it to go to the trouble of inventing new forms of itself—which can appear unbeautiful at first—and if I sense a writer is flashing too much beauty at me, I tend to question her motives."

  Surrendering to Your Own Maneuvers: An Interview with Jana Prikryl
  By Jonathan Lee June 21, 2016
  AT WORK
  jana-prikryl

  The After Party, Jana Prikryl’s debut collection of poems, is divided in two. In the first half, the reader is mainly in New York, swaying between the modern and the classical, easing between Internet aphorisms and well-dusted literary lives; in half a dozen gently mocking, moving lines in “Ars Poetica,” we find ourselves falling from an observation about Kelly Oxford’s tweets into Arthur Conan Doyle and the history of spiritualism. The collection’s second half switches modes, and we find ourselves engaged with a long, bold sequence of fragments that carry an air of nostalgia. These later poems explore the natural world, the interplay between femininity and masculinity, and a lingering sense of not belonging. Perhaps it’s an odd comparison, but the closing sequence, “Thirty Thousand Islands,” made me think of Matisse and his 1940s cutouts: the preeminent sense of environment, but also the way that techniques of balance and contrast seem to give the work its structure and much of its impact.

  Ideas of in-betweenness seem to be at the heart of everything Prikryl writes, and maybe that’s unsurprising. When she was six, she and her parents and brother fled what was then Czechoslovakia. They settled in southern Ontario, and it is Canada—particularly the eastern side of Lake Huron—that provides the most memorable evocations of landscape: “An animal tone / to the granite / as it masses and hides in the water.” Her 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. I asked Prikryl about how she balances writing and editing, her devotion to staying “true to the movements of one’s own mind,” and her idea that poetry might be “meant to resist a certain kind of good time”—a form better suited to the after-party than the crowded room.

  INTERVIEWER

  Can you talk a little about the structure of The After Party and the move from individual poems into sequential fragments that are not afforded the autonomy of their own titles?

  PRIKRYL

  When I started writing “Thirty Thousand Islands,” the book’s second half, the sequential nature of it took me by surprise. I’d never written a very long poem before, and I didn’t start with that intention in mind, and in fact as it accumulated I tried to distract myself from questions of its potential scale or meaning or ending. I think a person like me, who can’t do narrative but needs to generate meaning through language, has to trick herself into productivity a lot of the time, especially when a longer project seems to beckon. And once the sequence was underway, it seemed the poems I’d written one by one, in the first half, were galvanized by the stylistic difference of the sequence, as if the whole collection needed not to proceed from my center of gravity alone. I like Wallace Stevens’s comment that the imagination is “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.” It suggests something of how you have to surrender to your own maneuvers.

  INTERVIEWER

  What kinds of maneuvers did you find yourself surrendering to?

  PRIKRYL

  There’s a line where a piece of writing goes from “surprising” the writer to being subject to her control. I think this border has to be crossed in both directions, all the time, for a poem or book to have any vitality. As I say, I’ve never had the capacity to invent fiction, but reconnoitering the possibilities of “Thirty Thousand Islands” through these discrete island poems was a new kind of formal experience for me. More than an individual lyric poem, a sequence invites time into it. And if narrative remains elusive, I think both writer and reader are forced to work to orient themselves, to stay alert, like a foreigner in a new city at night.

  The tension between repetition and development in “Thirty Thousand Islands” is something I hoped to emulate from John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito poems, and even Eliot’s Four Quartets, where time itself keeps raking over various northern landscapes. And after many years of composing distinct separate poems, I found constructing this sequence was a bit like writing a play—it was a relief to feel that each utterance had to jostle against others, and that none had the last word.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’ve said before that “A Place as Good as Any,” one of the poems in The After Party, is “a transcription of a dream.”

  PRIKRYL

  Lately I came across a line by Anne Carson, in an essay on sleep. “No other experience gives us so primary a sense of being governed by laws outside us.” Every night we enter this incredibly coercive state, and I think that sense of being harried by one’s own consciousness nicely suggests the difficulty of being a person, born into certain historical circumstances, and not being quite sure where one’s “I” resides within one’s perceptions, or which kernel of those perceptions is most “authentically” one’s own.

  I think right now readers of all genres put a lot of faith in language and its capacity to reveal—possibly because we live in a time of unhinged political mendacity, so it’s very comforting to believe that literature can provide direct access to someone else’s uncomplicated truth? Even novels and poems are increasingly valued, I think, as repositories of information. I’ve always been skeptical about that. Basically I hate poetry that pretends it’s possible to say what you mean. Obviously you have to mean what you say! But in poetry just as in fiction, there can be a lot of truth in dishonesty. For me, the excitement of writing something like a poem usually resides in prodding and questioning the words that claim to represent what my brain claims to want to be saying.

  9781101906231INTERVIEWER

  A sense of place seems important in the collection, particularly in its second half—the shores of Lake Huron.

  PRIKRYL

  I think place tends to serve as a shorthand for history. The things people have done to one another pile up in distinct patterns in certain places, and we call these layers of sediment “the local custom” or “national character” or “tradition” or “religion” or “dialect.” Having had a fairly peripatetic childhood—between Czechoslovakia and Canada, and there was also a year spent in Austria—and having lived in New York for almost thirteen years, I don’t feel I can call any one place home, unless home is the odd-shaped constellation of writers I love.

  I’ve always been puzzled by Elizabeth Hardwick’s criticism of Sylvia Plath—whom I admire but don’t feel especially close to—along the lines that the “brutal” quality of her work is owing to “a special lack of national and local roots” and “her foreign ancestors on both sides.” Aside from being strangely deterministic, the comment seems to imply that having national or local roots is the natural, inevitable way to be. Obviously that’s not been my experience. I think it’s increasingly rare for most people. One of the things Plath’s poems dramatize so forcefully is the blunt fact that a woman or any member of a historically exploited group is a kind of rootless cosmopolitan—almost by virtue of their exclusion or disadvantage, they can acquire an awareness of their society that’s unavailable to those who have power. When I’m writing, place usually acts as a metaphor for time and history, and for the ways a person’s freedom and selfhood are circumscribed or enlarged.

  INTERVIEWER

  It’s interesting that you were drawn back to writing about Canada.

  PRIKRYL

  I grew up in southern Ontario from the age of six, after my parents and brother and I fled Czechoslovakia, so I owe a lot to the place and to its warm embrace of my family. I often feel I owe my entire identity to it, since I can’t imagine who I’d be if my parents hadn’t brought me where I’d eventually learn to speak English. Yet as soon as I could make literary distinctions I gravitated toward American and English and Irish and Central European literature. As soon as I could leave, I did, first working in a bookstore in England for six months before university, then living in Dublin for almost two years after graduating, and eventually my romance with American literature brought me to New York City in 2003. So “Thirty Thousand Islands” was also a way for me to reckon with my enormous, openly sentimental debt to a place whose actual literary tradition I happen to feel little affinity for. It’s about the fairly common experience of homelessness on planet Earth, in other words. And the place itself—this archipelago of pink rocky islands in a northern landscape, filled with pine trees and cottages—is a bit neither flesh nor fowl, neither land nor sea, so besides being very pretty it seems to ask what “place” is, just how much earth—or local culture—is required for a place to serve as home. I felt an urge to evoke that region and conjure its beauty, while humoring my own doubts (not total but persistent) about the uses of beauty in literature. Beauty is necessary in art, but I usually want it to go to the trouble of inventing new forms of itself—which can appear unbeautiful at first—and if I sense a writer is flashing too much beauty at me, I tend to question her motives.

  INTERVIEWER

  What does your writing process tend to be—the when, where and how—and do you find yourself writing poetry even during busy periods of editing at the NYRB?

  PRIKRYL

  I wish I was more disciplined. I rarely stick to a poetry-writing routine around the perimeters of my job at the Review, especially as I often devote a lot of my free time to writing essays. It’s been satisfying and enriching to write the essays, and in an ideal groove the writing of critical prose tends to irritate me into spinning off odd lines of verse that can grow into poems, with luck and application. But often there isn’t enough time and the poems appear sporadically. I jot the odd line or note to myself in a notebook, and compose and revise the bulk of the poems on my laptop. It’s true there is a certain zen state that can come of sitting in my cubicle at work and not actually being able to devote my full attention to the poem that’s asserting itself. In these cases, I type quick e-mails to myself at work, and it’s surprisingly freeing to write while part of the mind—the self-censoring part?—is occupied elsewhere, or at least aware of the inappropriateness of the task. And that said—hello, colleagues!—this doesn’t happen more than about twice a year. One of the poems in the book, “A Motion in Action,” plays with this paradox of thwarted attention and enhanced intuition.

  INTERVIEWER

  Is it important in your work to bring moments of popular culture into proximity with what still gets called high culture—Kelly Oxford’s tweets segueing, within a few lines, into Arthur Conan Doyle’s surrender to the disciples of Madame Blavatsky?

  PRIKRYL

  Mixing high and low isn’t important to me as such. I do think it’s crucial to be true to the movements of one’s own mind, if those movements are the premise of a given poem, as they are in “Ars Poetica,” the poem you mention. There it seemed important not to pretend that musings on Twitter don’t flow smoothly on to Madame Blavatsky—though really what I was getting at was the problem of woolly, abstract language in contemporary poetry. I try to approach each new poem as an experiment whose parameters and materials aren’t fully known to me until after the thing is written. When it comes to mixing high and low, T. S. Eliot is the usual suspect, and I love his poems and the freedom with which he moves between voices and sources, high and low—but most interesting to me is how brazenly he goes from superhuman eloquence to language, or rhetoric, that has clearly failed the speaker.

  INTERVIEWER

  Is all writing about writing, all poetry about poetry?

  PRIKRYL

  All my favorite fiction and poetry in some sense is. I’m trying to think of a book written so transparently that it achieves escape velocity from its own medium. One of my favorite recent books was Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which gets very close to this—the language feels impersonal and almost antiseptic, yet it’s one of the most emotionally true and intimate depictions of female adulthood that I’ve read in a long time. But even Outline, in finding a language of glass-like clarity and lack of affect, takes a position on the novel’s form and seems to be proposing a new relation between prose and the experience it’s trying to convey. Possibly because English is my first language but was the third one I learned, after Czech and German, and I still speak Czech but that’s a kind of anti–lingua franca whose foreignness feels sealed in my mind, I often find myself writing about the problem of language, the ways it’s fortified against our attempts to claim it rather than the ways it’s available to us.

  INTERVIEWER

  What about the idea of the occult, and of mortality and afterlives, in your work?

  PRIKRYL

  A good friend of mine paid me the highest compliment a few months ago when she read the book and said, It’s all about death! I pumped my fist.

  I think any artist who makes things intended, however quixotically, to outlast them has to feel a little posthumous all the time. Afterlives and the occult I find pretty boring. The potency of death is to focus the mind on the particulars of life on this earth. I think this is also why poetry is such a visual art form. The simple act of looking is a good metaphor for gaining insight and for the speed-of-light connections of thought itself. And poets are people who look very closely … because death!

  INTERVIEWER

  As a writer of novels I hear constantly that the novel is dying. I imagine there might be something liberating or purifying about working in a medium, a beautiful and intensely difficult one, that a lot of people think is already long dead—whatever they mean by that.

  PRIKRYL

  I think the reports of poetry’s death have been greatly exaggerated. But you’re asking if its perceived demise confers some advantage on poets, and I don’t think marginalizing an art form can liberate or purify it. Any art that recedes from a respected orbit in culture grows provincial—becomes a “craft”—because I think art needs an audience big enough for some portion of it to be really discerning.

  That said, I’m not sure it’s been shown that a profound understanding of poetry has ever been less obscure relative to dominant culture than it is now. There was the satirical poetry of the eighteenth century, sure, and people always seem to look back fondly on the nineteenth century, when classical literature and the poetic canon were prerequisites for the upper classes. Ben Lerner’s new book, The Hatred of Poetry, is pretty persuasive in suggesting that people have always indulged a nostalgia for a golden age of poetic literacy that never really existed. I guess I wonder if much of the poetry that was joyfully, popularly read in the nineteenth century was read in a way we’d consider sophisticated now. What if poetry could actually be defined as that writing which defies mass appreciation, or penetration, and only ever attracts a minority of readers willing and able to sit alone with it and perceive the many formal and intuitive choices that went into its making? I’m not saying it will always defy “mass enjoyment,” but it seems interesting to ask if poetry is meant to resist a certain kind of good time, and if it always has, even in the days when undergrads were quoting Horace to one another at parties.

  Jana Prikryl’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review no. 206, 211, 215, and 217.

  Jonathan Lee’s latest novel is High Dive.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/jana-prikryl

  Jana Prikryl
  Poet Details
  http://janaprikryl.tumblr.com/

  Poet and editor Jana Prikryl was born in the Czech Republic. At age six, she immigrated to Canada with her family. Prikryl earned a BA from the University of Toronto and lived in Dublin before moving to New York, where she earned an MA in cultural criticism from New York University. She is the author of the poetry collection The After Party (2016). Her poetry and criticism appear widely, in magazines and journals such as the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the Baffler, and the New York Review of Books. Her essays on photography and film appear regularly in the New York Review and the Nation.

  Prikryl has received a fellowship from Yaddo and is the recipient of a Creative Writing Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a senior editor at the New York Review of Books.

• Jana Prikryl Home Page - http://janaprikryl.tumblr.com/about

  About
  My first collection of poems, The After Party, is out now from Tim Duggan Books. I was born in Czechoslovakia, grew up in Canada, studied English at the University of Toronto, and lived in Dublin for a couple of years before moving to New York City.
  My poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Baffler, and elsewhere. My poem “A Place as Good as Any” is included in The Unprofessionals, a Paris Review anthology (Penguin). I’ve received a fellowship from Yaddo and a creative writers’ grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. My essays on photography and film have appeared in The Nation, The Believer, Slate, n+1, and The New York Review of Books, where I work as a senior editor.

• Globe and Mail - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/jana-prikryl-it-is-important-to-remember-the-strange-shapes-you-think-you-see-in-things/article31463653/

  QUOTED: "It’s because I wanted to give them a decent start in life, I wanted them to have a chance to converse with and be tested against the poetic tradition(s) that had helped produce them, and once the manuscript started to cohere, I wanted it to have readers. Because I wasn’t getting any younger."

  Jana Prikryl: ‘It is important to remember the strange shapes you think you see in things’
  The Globe and Mail
  Published Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 11:35AM EDT
  Last updated Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 11:35AM EDT
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  After having written for the New Yorker, the Paris Review and the London Review of Books, among other publications, Jana Prikryl published her first book of poems, The After Party, earlier this summer. Born in the Czech Republic and raised in Canada, Prikryl currently lives in New York, where she works as an editor at the New York Review of Books.

  Why did you write your new book?

  I really don’t know. The “why” fuels the writing and only the act of writing can consume the “why.” If you asked why I assembled the poems into a book rather than left them sitting in a drawer – it’s because I wanted to give them a decent start in life, I wanted them to have a chance to converse with and be tested against the poetic tradition(s) that had helped produce them, and once the manuscript started to cohere, I wanted it to have readers. Because I wasn’t getting any younger.

  What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

  “Remember the hunchbacks, interpret nothing,” which was given to me by Norman Rush in Mating. The line occurs after the book’s narrator is horrified to see a group of identically deformed children in the desert; anyway, they appear to be deformed until they each remove a bowl from inside their shirts, which they carry across the desert for obvious reasons. As a person who’s congenitally anxious and prone to seeing symbols and often nefarious designs everywhere, I find it helpful to have a little prayer I can utter when based on no real evidence I leap to conclusions. Then again, it is important to remember the strange shapes you think you see in things – it is in fact important to remember the hunchbacks.

  What agreed-upon classic do you despise?

  Almost all the products of William Wordsworth’s earnest little mind. Poetry tends to resist smug certainties and predetermined conclusions, but Wordsworth has a kind of genius for self-transcription: He thinks a thought or holds a belief, and then he spells it out for you, and in that transaction – which is hardly a transaction! Nothing has really been exchanged, or changed – there’s no room for anything to surprise him much less the reader. I think his unquestioned pedestal in the canon has more to do with people’s admiration of his positions, his “message,” than with the ways he got that message across – which seems to me a function of the tastes of the prose-based community, warping what poetry is meant to do and capable of doing. Plus, he was personally and professionally cruel to Coleridge, whom I love in an awfully personal way. I tend to take my own partisanship on behalf of Coleridge past the brink of self-parody… because somebody’s got to.

  What’s a book every 10-year-old should read?

  I can only suggest the only book I loved at that age: Harriet the Spy – the ur-text of those who wish to be invisible! I wasn’t a great reader as a kid; up until I was 14 or 15, it’s as though books reminded me of how hard it had been to learn to speak English – at the age of 6, after my family immigrated to Canada – and I just didn’t consider reading a fun pursuit. I still remember my intense disappointment if anyone gave me a book for my birthday – before I entered adolescence, as I say, at which point I discovered all at once that books – though written, alas, in English, or in any language – were usually better than people.

  What’s your favourite bookstore in the world?

  There’s a tiny remainder bookshop in Bath, England, called Good Buy Books, where I worked for five months between high school and my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto. I’d saved up for the journey from part-time and summer jobs and got my hands on the “bookstores” sections of Bath’s and Oxford’s Yellow Pages, and sent out application letters in a quixotic bid to be hired sight unseen. I actually received a flurry of very polite rejections, and one amazingly trusting acceptance. Good Buy Books is still there, selling remaindered art books and local tourist guides, and Bath itself – despite hordes of summer tourists – is miraculously preserved in its Georgian – and Roman – golden limestone sublime.

QUOTED: "In her astute debut, Prikryl speaks confidently of and from the in-between places of the world."

The After Party: Poems
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p131.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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The After Party: Poems

Jana Prikryl. Crown/Duggan, $15 trade paper

(112p) ISBN 978-1-101-90623-1

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In her astute debut, Prikryl speaks confidently of and from the in-between places of the world and the people almost relegated to scenery in memories. Throughout the book, the idea of narrative's assertiveness becomes a driving force. Prikryl asks, "If I say this in the tone of a photograph/ will it inject you with the feeling/1 felt in that place?" The collection's first half offers glimpses into the temporary, replete with scenes of immigration, intergenerational relations, and waiting for others. The series that makes up the book's second half helps contextualize the first. These poems revolve around nearly forgotten islands of "pink-complexioned rock" that "defy photographers," celebrating the idea of a place that "had its uses/ at one time, its maneuvers" but even now, when observed, requires a kind of "wringing concentration." One of the section's narrators, Mr. Dialect, is part retired dandy, part Greek chorus. He watches from his houseboat, Never Better, with "His very mood/ an index/ of gestures that the artist/ oversteps." As Prikryl probes the shortcomings of being conscious of the nature of observing, she maintains a lively tension and gets her readers to ponder as well: "What we are most/ easily seduced by must/ tell us something/ about ourselves, but what/ if it tells us only about everyone else?" (July)

Jana Prikryl: The After Party
World Literature Today. 90.6 (November-December 2016): p89.
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Jana Prikryl

The After Party

Tim Duggan Books

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Walking a fine line between urbane and universal, Jana Prikryl impresses with this debut collection of verse. With language both precise and playful, these poems act as the ideal party host, finding the reader where he or she may be and gently encouraging the conversation between the audience and the great American poetry tradition.

QUOTED: "Metaphor is a poet's spell, her magic; more than any other feature of poetry, it transforms reality-unless, as here, it's already a part of reality, swarming, and thereby taking the place of, the "surfaces of things." Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have an independent intelligence."

Childhood's End
Dan Chiasson
The New Yorker. 92.24 (Aug. 8, 2016): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
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Byline: Dan Chiasson

Childhood's End

A debut about life, language, and what binds them.

Jana Prikryl's first book of poems, "The After Party" (Tim Duggan Books), brings to a close the long period of silent evaluation known as childhood. The "after party" is our memory of the past, not so much recollected in tranquillity as relived in the riotous terms of style and form. But it is also the afterlife: this is a book haunted by generations of the dead, including Prikryl's brother, who died suddenly in 1995; the book is dedicated to him. In this bonus interval of borrowed time, the hour ticks by especially loudly; the poems that measure it are also subject to it. There is a contest here between elegy and forgetting. In "Timepiece," the meter (iambic dimeter, a rare one, and hard to pull off effectively) recalls not only that ticking of a clock but the beating of a heart:

Do not lose hope.

We found new hope.

There is no hope.

You have to hope.

It's my last hope.

There's always hope.

It grows on trees.

The poem veers from the pattern in its last line, literally giving up "hope"; but the underlying rhythm holds on for one last instant. Hope vanishes the moment it becomes ubiquitous: "It grows on trees" is what we say of something so common as to be worthless. "Timepiece" is a poem about perseverance, although, as in much of Prikryl's work, there's a vicious undertow of despair.

Prikryl, who is a senior editor at The New York Review of Books (to which I contribute), was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated with her family to Ontario, Canada, when she was six-a passage that seems to have created an attitude of friendly scrutiny toward tragic material. Many of these poems filter her earliest memories through the scrim of folklore, from which they borrow their swift, severe causality and, especially, their terror of abandonment. Their aesthetic is bright, kaleidoscopic, a child's vision of abundance frozen and preserved; she borrowed it in part from the genre of Czech movies called pohedka , lavish costume versions of fairy tales. Prikryl tends to favor paradox, as in the riddles and tests of childhood stories, and innuendo, which feels at once erotic and political. She moves by not moving, desiring "little / more than the // arrival of the little more / that arrives," finding everywhere "misunderstandings that are not, / we both know, misunderstandings."

Prikryl is a notably resourceful writer of autobiography. When poets write about their past, they sometimes exclude their shaping hand from the picture. There are countless poems that describe grainy black-and-white photographs in a tenderly impartial tone, as though photographs and the poems that describe them weren't acts of selection and judgment. Prikryl not only acknowledges but plays up her role in curating her origins: in "A Package Tour," she casts herself as a kind of intrepid Time Lord, hoisting "a furled umbrella" as she leads her unsuspecting European ancestors toward the poem written about them. This kind of temporal loop-de-loop is not merely postmodern mischief; it's autobiographical writing with the act of writing left in. It foils the illusion of linear chronology: the last is first, the first is last. The poem is a "making-of" documentary supplied with English subtitles, a work assembled after the fact to lead triumphantly to the main event.

Prikryl's memories of childhood are intensely sensory: lacking a family narrative with a clear form, she presents, instead, unusually vivid, one-off impressions and colorful hunches about what they might have meant. "Ontario Gothic," the book's opening poem, is a little two-part origin story. In the first part, Prikryl lies on her back, summer-daydream style, and looks up at the clouds and "floating albino basketballs of hydrangea," along with "anything else passing over, including / one has to assume"-since it can't be verified, except in the imagination-"the neutral look / on a passenger's face glancing down from a window seat." Sentience in a poem can go wherever it likes: here it gets divvied up between the earthly kid and the heavenly traveller, the one looking up at the other looking down. In the second part, dream logic takes the wheel:

Halfway there he squeezed between the shoulders of the seats

to join his wife and me in back. I need hardly tell you

what a stretch it was, wedging my arm between the driver's seat and door

to steer with the tips of my fingers,

sidewalks in those parts just wide enough for a car.

The man is her father, or perhaps her lover; the woman in the back seat, his "wife," is pointedly not referred to as her mother. The speaker is a child-or a grownup acting like one, or being treated like one-who nevertheless is entrusted with this anti-family's survival. The child who grows up feeling that her family's safety depends on her own composure, no matter how crazy the circumstances, steers herself again and again into adult jams where her mettle alone makes all the difference.

In "Ontario Gothic," it's a stretch to become a back-seat driver. To a new speaker of the language, English idioms retain a troubling trace of literalness long after they are understood. All the more so if the novice speaker is also a child: children write stories with real-life couch potatoes, where cats and dogs rain from the sky. "Thanks to that one's nerve," Prikryl writes in "Siblings and Half Siblings," "the four of us boarded an overnight // and this is English." Meaning that otherwise she'd be writing Czech. If a change of life is a change of language, why rank the one above the other? "Reality's my kind of metaphor," she writes; and, elsewhere, "metaphors swarm the surfaces of things." These lines from "Unrequited" nail it: "His feeling is metaphor so complete / it's the hum alone on loan from the hive."

Metaphor is a poet's spell, her magic; more than any other feature of poetry, it transforms reality-unless, as here, it's already a part of reality, swarming, and thereby taking the place of, the "surfaces of things." Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have an independent intelligence. As Prikryl writes, it "houses a will as acquisitive / as ours, if not more so": it compels its speakers to say whatever it has in mind. In "Ars Poetica," language has its own dreams, not of sex but of "description, unmitigated / description," dragging the fainthearted poet into acts of seduction she'd really (swear to God, really and truly) rather not attempt. It's a brilliant and funny poem about the power of feigned powerlessness, a subject at least as old as the shepherds and lasses of classical pastoral. An imagined debate between Prikryl and Benedict Cumberbatch about "what's driven poets to this bluff / of severely impartial / impudence" lands them in an Alphonse-Gaston routine at a party's end, before Cumberbatch suggests, reasonably enough, that "we spare / each other the embarrassment / of being the last / to leave and leave in unison." Prikryl's response: "Goodness that shows / every sign of being also / resourceful has always been so / difficult to refuse."

An after party keeps people from vanishing into the night, and yet it, too, has an end. The fear that cherished people will evaporate creates the fantasy of a leave-taking that leaves nobody behind. As with lost siblings in many fairy tales, the loss feels remediable, as though the right path through the forest or the right sequence of words might somehow restore them. A book that tries so earnestly to dilate endings, or to divide them infinitely into smaller and smaller units, has to be concerned with its own manner of conclusion. The collection's final poem, which, in forty-two sections, takes up almost half the book, is a remarkable sequence: "Thirty Thousand Islands," named for the largest freshwater archipelago in the world, in Lake Huron. Its hero is Mr. Dialect, a name that suggests his retention of Old World language and customs. (Prikryl's brother was seven years older than she was, and so had more to lose when the family left Czechoslovakia.) Mr. Dialect wears a "suit bespoke / and out of style," frozen, as he is, at the moment of his death; his bearing has about it the terrible luxury of an open coffin. He excels at evasion. He cannot be adequately described, partly because his own command of style raises such a high bar ("His very mood / an index / of gestures that the artist / oversteps"), and his death seems almost an aspect of his suaveness and civility. He will "rise"-like the sun, like Lazarus-"with an air of dressing / to breakfast beside / a caramel brunette." When he speaks, he offers this dating advice for the pickup bars of the afterlife:

When the voices start confiding their Christian names

as I'm rinsing plates on the Never

it's time to haul anchor, wait

in a dive in Parry Sound,

and buy a round

for whoever won't be a stranger.

Should a drink materialize

you didn't order, make eyes

at the girl who didn't send it, as I'd have done.

The poem's sections offer, like the thirty thousand islands they describe, the chance that Mr. Dialect might touch down anywhere, at any moment. He's not dead; he's just living on one of the other islands. His sister's book has become the place where he can tarry awhile, maybe even settle down:

Should some international

undocumented

wish to pursue

a lifestyle entirely free

from applause,

he reflected, this

would be the place.

He glances round.

Mr. Dialect assumes his immortality as the eerie beauty of the place, the "cool underpinning" of its pines and shimmering waters, yields to the beauty of the language that is used to conjure it.

"The After Party: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 131. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456344710&it=r&asid=8afba161e301713c351140d6454cad75. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. "Jana Prikryl: The After Party." World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 6, 2016, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469459976&it=r&asid=54c0e9ae810974e8c1930e59251ad895. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Chiasson, Dan. "Childhood's End." The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461962770&it=r&asid=8c8c271a9beb707d3c9b820ab0651981. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.

• New York Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/jana-prikryl-consolations-of-strangeness/
  Word count: 3499

  QUOTED: "Reading some of her poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context."

  The Consolations of Strangeness Charles Simic AUGUST 18, 2016 ISSUE
  The After Party
  by Jana Prikryl
  Tim Duggan Books, 112 pp., $15.00 (paper)
  Jana Prikryl, Hudson Valley, New York, January 2016
  Patrick Kelley
  Jana Prikryl, Hudson Valley, New York, January 2016
  There has been so much poetry written in the United States in the last thirty years that it has become difficult for even its most passionate readers, among whom I count myself, to pretend to have a broad, comprehensive view of the thousands of poems that have been published in books and literary magazines over that time. That was not always the case.

  In the 1950s, American poetry was a small pond with a few big fish in it and others of various sizes swimming around them, so it was easy to see who was imitating whose moves, whose progeny were multiplying and whose were looking sickly. Of course, there were others too, sulking on the murky bottom of the pond and keeping their own counsel, but they were by and large invisible.

  The Beat poets changed all that. They made such a splash that even high school kids were reading Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Thanks to their popularity, bars and coffee shops started having poetry readings, with colleges and universities following soon after, inviting other kinds of poets to read as well and offering them jobs to teach creative writing. Today, with thousands of graduates of writing programs publishing collections and still more graduating every year, it’s hard to believe that a book of poems can be completely original, but despite the great odds, it still happens.

  Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it with no desire to call it quits. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same.

  If that weren’t so, how could we still understand and enjoy the old Greek, Roman, and Chinese poems and recognize ourselves in them while knowing next to nothing about the world those poets lived in? Reading Jana Prikryl’s book, it crossed my mind that neither William Blake nor Emily Dickinson would have had much trouble making sense of this poem of hers:

  THE MOTH

  “New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage…left over from their lives as larvae.”

  —Science

  He’d like to be at one with his new self
  but memories sit in him like eyes.

  Sometimes scent implies an unheard-of
  idea and he’s off
  but it’s just another of the given forms.

  You’d think flight would be decent redress,
  the power to sift himself through air
  and leave each thought in its old place,
  where hard feelings also could be left.

  He shrugs and the wings
  quiver with great precision,
  nature will have to live with what it’s done,
  he cannot manage even resignation
  without a show of grace.

  The work of a poet is a confluence of influences, either skillfully concealed, as Keats is in Stevens’s early poems, or plain to see, as Laforgue and some of his French contemporaries are in those written by Eliot in the first decades of the twentieth cenury. “The Moth” may remind us of other poems (I thought of Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”), but not in any obvious derivative way. Where does originality in poetry come from then? It comes from tinkering with some older poetic model. It comes from seeing its weaknesses along with its attractions. It comes from sober deliberation or from groping blindly in the dark. It comes from god-knows-what and only-the-devil knows. Some degree of irreverence is always involved. Kneeling before a masterpiece, as I once saw a man do before El Greco’s Christ on the Cross Adored by Two Donors in the Louvre, is not the way to go.

  Jana Prikryl was born in Communist Czechoslovakia in the bleak industrial town of Ostrava, a few miles from the border of Poland. She was five years old when her parents feigned a semi-annual camping trip to the Dalmatian Coast, knowing that others had somehow fled through Yugoslavia. Instead they detoured to Zagreb, where they discovered they could get a four-day tourist visa to Austria and cross the border “legally,” though their passports were valid solely for travel to Yugoslavia, and they could be caught and sent home where her parents would be thrown in jail. They managed to slip through and eventually ended up in Canada. She received a BA from the University of Toronto and lived in Dublin before moving to New York, where she earned an MA in cultural criticism from New York University.

  With so much travel in her life, it’s no wonder that the locations in her poems keep changing from country to country and that people we encounter in them often appear to be stateless. Though parents, siblings, husbands, and lovers are mentioned or alluded to, we often in fact have no idea who they are. Prikryl tells us little about them and their reasons for being where they are.

  Reading some of her poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context. Unlike poets who are eager to give their readers lengthy and detailed accounts of their private lives, she is discreet. She remains faithful to the ambiguity of our existence, that condition of being aware of the multiple meanings of everything we do or is done to us, and she’s wary of settling for one at the expense of the others and leaving the poetry that went along with them behind.

  I first came across her name reading her essays on film and photography in The New York Review and The Nation and subsequently her poems in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and other prestigious publications. The After Party is her first book of poems. It’s divided into two parts, the first made up of thirty-two poems, some with intriguing and forbidding titles like “The Letters of George Kennan and John Lukacs, Interspersed with Some of My Dreams,” “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele,” and “It Doesn’t Work Out as I Read Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary and Camera Lucida.” Here’s a poem with a simpler title, but with an intriguing plot:

  ONTARIO GOTHIC

  1.

  The dwarf maple caught my attention
  in an ominous way, its purple,
  its deep purple leaves shredded gloves
  that gesture “Don’t worry, don’t worry,”
  among floating albino basketballs of hydrangea
  among other things the people landscaped
  like fake lashes round the top of the eye
  that then all summer takes in clouds
  and anything else passing over, including
  one has to assume
  the neutral look
  on a passenger’s face glancing down from a window seat.

  2.

  Halfway there he squeezed between the shoulders of the seats
  to join his wife and me in back. I need hardly tell you
  what a stretch it was, wedging my arm between the driver’s seat and door
  to steer with the tips of my fingers,
  sidewalks in those parts just wide enough for a car.
  Why he wanted me to take the wheel
  I was too busy not getting us killed
  to unravel; there was the traffic, a thing
  coming at us with its mouth wide open, and in back
  the two of them
  whispered in their corner,
  taking up very little space,
  less than was right,
  and then less and less, gasping at the joke he’d set in motion.

  Poetry is as visual an art as are painting and the cinema. One reads poetry for the same reason one goes out for a drive, to see fresh sights. Images are bait, they trap our minds, revive some memory of our own, and get our imaginations working. Note how “the dwarf maple” the unidentified speaker notices in the first line of the poem is followed by a series of images, one more startling and disturbing than the last, from the purple leaves being shredded gloves and gesturing “Don’t worry,” to hydrangea flowers floating like albino basketballs, all unfolding in slow motion, culminating in plants landscaped like fake eyelashes around the top of the eye, and the disinterested look on a passenger’s face glancing down from a window seat—the kinds of things one may recall seeing in the moments before a car crash.

  The second stanza complicates the plot. There appear to be three people in the car, two women in the back and the man who is driving (or are they stopped in traffic?) when he joins his wife in the back, leaving the narrator to get hold of the wheel and steer the car as best she can with the tips of her fingers while the other two squeeze into the corner beside her, whispering and making out, gasping at this farce the man has set in motion, while the traffic charges at them “with its mouth wide open.” By leaving out so many details, Prikryl invites her readers (as I did) to deduce the rest, because she wants to convey the feeling of everything occurring at once in a moment of panic, as it would to this woman struggling to keep the car on the road and not get herself and her passengers killed.

  As for the “Gothic” in the title, it evokes, of course, the atmosphere of suspense and horror that permeates the stories in that genre. Nonetheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that the situation in the poem is not just hair-raising but also side-splitting. The woman wedging her upper arm between the driver’s seat and door to steer the car with the tips of her fingers while her passengers are busy necking could have come out of one of Buster Keaton’s silent two-reelers.

  Giorgio de Chirico: The Pink Tower, 1916
  DeA Picture Library/Granger
  Giorgio de Chirico: The Pink Tower, 1916
  What makes Prikryl’s poems different is the way she subverts conventions by shuffling or leaving out entirely the chronology of events, blurring identities, cutting abruptly from one scene to another without explanation, and relying on the reader’s imagination to bridge these gaps. At first this may seem like a challenge one is not prepared to undertake in a poem, but after reading her for a while one gets the hang of it. Here’s another delightful poem of hers about a man scribbling notes to a woman at a funeral and making plans to meet her afterward.

  A PLACE AS GOOD AS ANY

  Outside the funeral of the politician who died young
  I waited for you. Rolled in my hand like a baton

  were tissues from the mourners inside
  that I was meant to throw away,

  a few with your scribbled notes to me.
  How they’d found me in that crowd I couldn’t say,

  or if the bottle blond was your wife
  or whether I had a husband.

  We sat near enough to barter
  knives and forks—the scraps of dinner theater

  The blond was climbing into your lap,
  Playing with the buttons on your jacket.

  Then all of us rose and circulated, more like a whirlpool
  than musical chairs. You on the far side of the banquet.

  That’s when you wrote me those notes, one by one,
  congealing into typescript in my hand.

  At times I glanced toward your place
  and we locked eyes like opponents in chess.

  Your hair was still so thick and dark
  I didn’t worry if I looked older.

  When I waited for you outside, clutching the tissues
  and pulling up tufts of grass, your friend’s shoulder

  presented itself. He said you lived in this town
  and couldn’t be seen leaving with me.

  I nodded, ducking back into the paneled saloon
  where he’d blacked out and was sprawled across linoleum.

  He agreed to drive me to the film festival.
  You’d be there in the dark with strange women and men,

  absorbed in pictures more honest than these
  if I ever found you again.

  Reviewing books by and about Pauline Kael in The New York Review, Prikryl describes the film critic as being “drawn to comedy because it always finds shortcuts to the awful truth.” I think she believes that too. If “Ontario Gothic” verges on being a farce, this is a more subtle kind of humor, more about a hypothetical romantic entanglement than the possibility of a real car crash, more about an attempt to arrange an assignation between a man and woman at the funeral of a politician that has gone awry. Prikryl has an eye for satire. She watches people closely. This poem is like good gossip, full of delicious visual details. It has a tongue-in-cheek quality that reminds me of Dorothy Parker, the funny lady who once told someone: “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

  Besides their mix of epochs, countries, and civilizations, the poems in The After Party differ widely from one another in the way they are written. If I were to list some of the finest poems in the book—“The Letters of George Kennan and John Lukacs, Interspersed with Some of My Dreams,” “Siblings and Half Siblings,” “Inverted Poem for the Fluoride Ladies of Pleasant Valley School,” “The Tempest,” “Stanley Cavell Pauses on the Aventine,” “To Tell of Bodies Changed,” “New York New York,” and “Crackers”—I’d find it difficult to put my finger on what they have in common, except for a quality of attention, a presence of a probing intellect alert to the strangeness of our lives as well as our own estrangement from ourselves, and an eye “susceptible to the consolations/of analogy,” as she says in another poem. Here’s a sonnet that is as much about a pillow the poet sleeps on as it is about the statelessness they both share:

  PILLOW

  How solitary
  and resolute you look in the morning.
  A stoic in your cotton sleeve.
  Do you dream of walking out

  rain or shine
  a truffle balanced on your sternum
  and passing me on the sidewalk?
  Or is that a smile

  because you interpret nothing
  and statelessness is where you live?
  How calmly you indulge my moods.

  See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse
  ceramics at the Met.
  Let’s hear what you’d do differently.

  The loosely linked, short, untitled poems in the second part of The After Party have the shared title “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The name refers to thousands of islands in Georgian Bay on Lake Huron in Ontario, a well-known vacation spot in Canada, where these poems are set, an amazing place, as one discovers taking a tour of them on YouTube. As she says:

  Here in the land Romanticism neglected
  the Enlightenment passed by and planted
  a shrub, a flag to flap and fling
  the moon’s weather, should you
  wish it confirmed.

  These poems do not make up a true sequence, since except for one enigmatic figure—a foreigner with a taste for Parisian shirts and an interest in geology, who compulsively translates from one language to another, circles phrases in newspapers, lives on a houseboat, and whom the poet calls Mr. Dialect—there are no others. He appears in some of the poems making witty remarks on the landscape and the people, but disappears for long stretches from the sequence. For Prikryl, as for Fernando Pessoa, there is more than one poet inside her. Indeed, these poems are so different from the other ones in the first part of her book that it took me a while to get used to them and begin to relish their brevity and their laid-back quality. Here is what they are like:

  The sky now kindling
  for him alone at five
  in the morning,
  Mr. Dialect will rise
  let’s say most days
  (there are no others)
  with an air of dressing
  to breakfast beside
  a caramel brunette,
  her taste in shoes
  unswervingly superb.
  It’s not among
  the things he learns
  to tire of such blessings

  *

  At lunch he dives.
  By way of aperitif he dives.
  He dives for breakfast.

  When you dive
  the world pours up around you
  continuously,

  a ribbon of motion
  defying end in
  a tone that borders on arrogance.

  Sounds and colors deepen
  on their way to achieving
  darkness and silence,
  which keep receding.

  A different situation however if
  the entire time the thing
  he was diving to reach
  were diving just behind him.

  This is occasional poetry at its best, relaxed, amusing, conveying the pleasure the poet took in each scene, while lounging in the shade of a big old tree (one imagines), jotting a few lines now and then in a small notebook, then perhaps dozing off and resuming writing the poem in bed late that night when everyone else was asleep. Goethe claimed this is the best kind of poem there is, reputedly using the naked back of the woman he slept with to scribble his verses on a sheet of paper. The old Japanese wrote brief, occasional poems, and so did the other ancients. “Do not ridicule the small./Little things can charm us all./Cupid was not big at all,” some unknown Greek said.

  I’m sure these poems presented Prikryl with a huge problem in trying to figure out how to incorporate them into this book. Not that there are no short poems in the first part, but they are so different in tone and so unlike these little odes of idleness and beauty in “Thirty Thousand Islands.” “All the girls are lovely by the seaside” one of them begins, for example, quoting an old dance-hall tune. Interspersing these nostalgic poems about a lost paradise among the other ones in the book would not have worked.

  Here’s the last poem in the sequence, as marvelous as so many others in this fine book:

  The pines absorb the night, its themes and fabrics,
  a lowering of blinds within blinds and glances perceiving glances,

  till nothing of night remains in the air and the sky begins to demonstrate
  again its essential property of flaring from all quarters

  and all morning the pines sparely with a kind of jealous, pointed
  attention unleash their reserves, granting each hour

  before noon its cool underpinning and each pine
  the work of expressing its individual silence

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/books/review/jana-prikryl-the-after-party-poems.html
  Word count: 843

  Time­Traveling Poems
  Consider the Self in Its Many
  Guises
  By JOEL BROUWER JULY 22, 2016
  THE AFTER PARTY
  Poems
  By Jana Prikryl
  112 pp. Tim Duggan Books. Paper, $15.
  “The After Party” seems an odd title for a poet’s first book. Have we come to
  opening night and found the show already closed? Jana Prikryl’s readers will quickly
  discover such rueful humor is typical of her understated sensibility. These poems
  don’t strive for effects or clamor for attention. Prikryl’s language isn’t fancy. She
  downplays her prosody in subtly rhymed lines, and her subjects are similarly
  unassuming. We find poems about a snowy night in the city, a summer day in the
  country, a visit to a museum, a visit from a sibling and other unremarkable stuff. But
  like John Ashbery, a clear influence, Prikryl is most fascinated by the unpredictable
  zigs and zags of an imagination in motion, and language’s laughable (but reliably
  amusing) incapacity to map that course precisely. “It’s funny to use your
  imagination,” she writes, “because it’s true.” Elsewhere, she quotes Roland Barthes:
  “The frivolous / insignificance of language, / the suspension of images / must be the
  very space / of love, its music.”
  If that sounds a bit heady, brace yourself; there’s more. Prikryl is a senior editor
  at The New York Review of Books (where, she wryly reports, “a mechanical pencil
  3/4/2017 Time­Traveling Poems Consider the Self in Its Many Guises ­ The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/books/review/jana­prikryl­the­after­party­poems.html 2/3
  has its way with me / half my waking life”), and it’s perhaps unsurprising that critics
  and self­reflexive intellectualism permeate her poems. This is a book in which
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge is familiarly referred to as “STC.” In “Stanley Cavell Pauses
  on the Aventine,” we overhear the philosopher musing on aesthetics; in “The Letters
  of George Kennan and John Lukacs, Interspersed With Some of My Dreams,” we get,
  well, that.
  Never miss a story.
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  Prikryl’s references to earlier authors and artists, allusions to the Soviet Union’s
  collapse and other more glancing gestures — a “politician who died young,” an ode
  describing a Buster Keaton film as “a sort of human finale, if not the very last
  absolutely necessary / movie” — imbue “The After Party” with, appropriately
  enough, a sense of belatedness, both literary and historical. George Orwell once
  summed up T.S. Eliot’s poetic trajectory by saying “the later poems express a
  melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair.” Reading Prikryl, such
  grand ideological and aesthetic struggles and pronouncements come to seem
  antique, even quaint; Prikryl is throwing an after party for the 20th century, with
  irony and tautology providing the entertainment. Here’s “Tumbril,” titled after the
  cart that ferried French monarchists to the guillotine:
  You have to hope we
  soon exhaust all hope because
  you sense one final hope
  and maybe the true one
  can be hoped for only
  after every hope has lost
  its head.
  There’s an air of weltschmerz on Prikryl’s “bluff / of severely impartial /
  impudence,” but a pleasure, too, in releasing oneself from the pressure to mean
  something all the time. That pleasure’s most amply evident in “Thirty Thousand
  3/4/2017 Time­Traveling Poems Consider the Self in Its Many Guises ­ The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/books/review/jana­prikryl­the­after­party­poems.html 3/3
  Islands,” a sequence set in Georgian Bay that recalls (and quotes from) Lorine
  Niedecker’s modernist masterpiece “Lake Superior.”
  Hopping from one associative sequence to the next, Prikryl touches on an
  abundance of themes, but none more potent or more pleasing than the act of
  association itself:
  My mind continued composing its
  account at night,
  I could hear it tracing glyphs on the
  hard substance
  abundant in these waters
  just of the aft deck to the tune of a
  gang of mosquitoes.
  I could hear its running indif erence to
  the indif erence
  of its medium,
  and I couldn’t help it,
  I mean there was literally nothing I
  could do
  to help, only listen to its business of
  joining words
  with the tip of its thought on the
  ongoing granite.
  Joel Brouwer is the head of the English department at the University of Alabama,
  Tuscaloosa. His fourth poetry collection, “Off Message,” will be published in October.
  A version of this review appears in print on July 24, 2016, on Page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review
  with the headline: Belated Wishes.

• Ploughshares
  http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/review-the-after-party-by-jane-prikryl/
  Word count: 576

  QUOTED: "Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is one of those rare debut volumes, like Stevens’s Harmonium, in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice."

  Review: THE AFTER PARTY by Jane Prikryl
  Author: Paul Scott Stanfield | Posted In Book Reviews, Poetry
  THE AFTER PARTY_prikryl

  The After Party
  Jana Prikryl
  Tim Duggan Books, June 2016
  112 pp; $15

  Buy: paperback

  Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is one of those rare debut volumes, like Stevens’s Harmonium, in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice. In some such cases, much unforeseeable development may be in store, as with Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts; sometimes, as with Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the debut may be almost the whole story. Predictions are futile. A reader does feel, though, that a new town has appeared on the map.

  Prikryl is interested in form (the book has sonnets, near-sonnets, and rhyme), but the forms often surprise: the monorhyme of “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele,” the variations on the word “hope” that play out in four short poems interspersed throughout the volume. “Inverted Poem for the Fluoride Ladies of Pleasant Valley School” may be read both top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. Gimmicky? Perhaps, but when the description “They stand erect, side by side, and shine / like knowledge” turns out to fit both public health workers in lab coats and teeth, a surreal insight has been attained.

  Like the fluoride ladies, the speakers in the poems take their responsibilities seriously, even when facing unreasonable requests. In Tisi’s painting, Claudia Quinta has to haul a large boat to shore by herself while a crowd watches. In “Ontario Gothic,” the speaker is asked to steer a car from the back seat: “Why he wanted me to take the wheel / I was too busy not getting us killed / to unravel […].” In “A Package Tour,” the dutiful speaker (“it’s important to me / to do some work of significance / or do my work conscientiously”) organizes a trip for her eight Czech great-grandmothers, but they are puzzled at the trip’s purpose (“Why did you show us all these things? / What do you bring besides information?”), and the speaker finally confesses the whole thing may have been a bid for the reader’s approval, “As if this could win me some advantage, / as if it might incline you to be generous.” The book’s most telling moments are when the voice shows the strain of its forbearance, when “argument […] drops its mask / and spits in every dinner plate” (“Ars Poetica”).

  Prikryl shows an affinity for the labyrinthine syntax of Henry James (e.g., the final stanza of “Argus, or Fear of Flying”), and the long poem that concludes the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands,” could be a reduced-to-its-essence Jamesian novel. Mr. Dialect lives (or summers) in the archipelago of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, immersed in its geology and history but at some remove from his fellow humans. Sometimes in first person (“I have a perpetual feeling / a lake ought not to be this size”), sometimes in third (“Mr. Dialect conserves / like a master tactician / the best of his Parisian shirts”), the poem gives us a man waiting for the beast in the jungle—or the pines—to spring. In the end, there are only pines.

• Puritan
  http://puritan-magazine.com/evasive-manoeuvres-a-review-of-the-after-party-by-jana-prikryl-n-grimaldi/
  Word count: 3782

  QUOTED: "Jana Prikryl’s debut book of poetry, The After Party, thoroughly compels and unapologetically alienates its reader. This ambivalent effect is appropriate given the text’s own investment in ambiguity, paradox, split-sense, and enigma. Everyone I’ve spoken to comes away from this book with dissimilar—even conflicting—observations. The sparse language, non-descript landscapes, narrative intractability, and tendency toward heady abstraction over descriptive closure generate a highly original but fugacious aesthetic of controlled imprecision. The poems are, above all, interested in the arbitrary and associative movement of consciousness; narrative sensibilities give way to the erratic evolution of thought."
  "At best, The After Party is a wonderfully textured feat, a platform upon which the reader might get a glimpse of untethered play and riff off their own set of obsessions and associations. At worst, the poems are self-revelling and frustratingly inaccessible. Nonetheless, the major insight of The After Party is epistemological in nature. Knowledge isn’t plainly discerned, but is either impenetrable or imaginary, decided by each through the arbitrary process of conviction."

  EVASIVE MANOEUVRES: A REVIEW OF THE AFTER PARTY BY JANA PRIKRYL
  by N. Grimaldi

  The After Party by Jana Prikryl

  Tim Duggan Books
  Penguin Random House
  320 Front Street West, Suite 1400
  Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3B6

  2016, 112 pp., $20.00, 9781101906231

  Such a gigantic abstraction withheld
  makes a person feel
  more creaturely than is proper. (from The Tempest)
  Jana Prikryl’s debut book of poetry, The After Party, thoroughly compels and unapologetically alienates its reader. This ambivalent effect is appropriate given the text’s own investment in ambiguity, paradox, split-sense, and enigma. Everyone I’ve spoken to comes away from this book with dissimilar—even conflicting—observations. The sparse language, non-descript landscapes, narrative intractability, and tendency toward heady abstraction over descriptive closure generate a highly original but fugacious aesthetic of controlled imprecision. The poems are, above all, interested in the arbitrary and associative movement of consciousness; narrative sensibilities give way to the erratic evolution of thought.

  Prikryl’s family immigrated to Southern Ontario from Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) when Prikryl was just six. She would go on to live in the US, the UK, and Dublin, Ireland. Her nomadic beginnings would in many ways come to constitute the thematic fascinations found in her work. The poems thus concern themselves with childhood, ancestry, inheritance, time, loss, place and placelessness, but the treatment is indirect, the tone lofty rather than sentimental. The poems are redolent of Eliot, or Ashbery: self-reflexive, ironic, proceeding unpredictably through meditative spaces.

  Despite such detectable influences, Prikryl’s work is very much its own. The strange style of the text—its discreet tone, shifting metres, and sprawling content—has the awkward lilt and mouthfeel of pronouncing a new or foreign word. Prikryl does not shy away from the hyper-intellectual, either, with titles like “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele” and “It Doesn’t Work Out as I Read Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary and Camera Lucida.” Prikryl’s poetic command is quite astonishing; the speakers’ declarative authority carefully lends structure to the collection’s abstruse inclinations. Still, this control is ever-tested by the poems’ constant assertion that life advances the way thought does: unexpectedly; that it “looms up unannounced, always a surprise” (“New Life”). Much like the angels carved above the sanctuary in the eighteenth-century church of “A Motion in Action,” The After Party can itself be described as “muscled gymnastic laboring / to […] outpace the extension of any perspective”; indeed, all the book’s “ingenuity is spent like this.”

  “Nationhood and locality … are human superimpositions, an arbitrary exercise in the cultivation of meaning.”
  The allure of Prikryl’s work is in part its reader-resistant style. On the back cover, John Ashbery describes the text as a “private biosphere,” subject only to its own laws of growth and evolution, and I would agree. Each poem submits to its own creative manoeuvres, demanding a hard-won digestion, and steadily deepening “like a mind accruing images” (“Argus, or Fear of Flying”).

  Structure & Style

  The After Party is divided into two sections. The first (composed of 32 poems) features a playful address to a pillow, strange conceit-adopting poems like “The Letters of George Kennan and John Lukacs, Interspersed with Some of My Dreams” and “Stanley Cavell Pauses on the Aventine,” as well as melancholic and meditative poems like “Understudy” and “Genealogy”—which read like occasional poems softly dissecting a scene—among other curious pieces. The first section establishes the fascinations taken up more comprehensively in the second section, which is titled “Thirty Thousand Islands” after the thousands of islands strung along the east side of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron in Ontario, near where Prikryl spent time as a child. “Thirty Thousand Islands” presents a number of short, untitled poems that may or may not be considered a sequence—the poems are loosely affiliated, and strung out (themselves island-like), over many mostly-blank pages.

  The Canadian landscape of “Thirty Thousand Islands” has a personal meaning and metaphorical import for Prikryl, though she admits in a Paris Review interview that her “openly sentimental debt” to her time in Canada doesn’t extend to the Canadian literary tradition, which she happens “to feel little affinity for.” Indeed, Prikryl’s aesthetic does not have recognizably Canadian influences. In documenting the natural world, Prikryl doesn’t siphon her observations through the landscape so much as she imaginatively projects onto it in order to make more abstruse examinations. She is wary of presenting the landscape too vividly, and relies on unusual imagery that, while evocative, prefers the elusive and cerebral over the visually specific:

  An animal tone
  to the granite
  as it masses and hides in the water.

  The trees that lean from the rock
  defy photographers
  Precise description defies the poet, or the poet defies it. Many of the poems advance in a sensory manner; any hint of a landscape is gleaned in a piecemeal fashion, context is often left out altogether, and the poems are scantily populated with figures (besides those of thought and speech). The tone is an unlikely blend of childlike deciphering (feelingly, without detail) and lofty, erudite observation:

  Lady in the tall forehead
  beating your winglike
  eyelids down, feel free, don’t hesitate, etc.

  She never employs a meta-language,
  a pose, a deliberate
  image. That’s what “Sanctity” is. (from “It Doesn’t Work Out …”)
  It’s tempting to underscore the poems’ moments of orphic anxiety and to see The After Party as a collection documenting the crisis of home-seeking—Prikryl’s migratory history perhaps enables this treatment. But more interesting than these moments of crisis regarding place and placelessness is the control exercised around them. The speakers are deliberate, canny; they embrace the tension between the familiar and the foreign as fertile ground for exploration, like the speaker of “New Life,” who looks out “a window onto something green and unconflicted.”

  “The major insight of The After Party is epistemological in nature.”
  These poems are more interested in how to be than in where to be: “I don’t have anywhere / to be except this unambiguous shore,” says one speaker (“Benvenuto …”). Of course, this “unambiguous shore” is deliberately left ambiguous by Prikryl, a paradox that exemplifies how most of her poems advance. The historical is coloured by the imaginative and the hypothetical. The declarative tone of the speakers so often acts against the poems’ awareness of contingency—but this tension is muted; there is room in each poem for a number of truths, a number of interpretive possibilities. The truth of one poem (and many truths are reeled off with conviction) is never the truth of another. The collection comes to accept place as both constitutive and arbitrary. It asks what is left of the mind, of the individual, in a state of ongoing transition through time and space. Place is a metaphor through which the text works out what it means to be a situated self, to have a locus of identity that one’s consciousness declares. There is an ambivalence about whether place is internally- or externally-derived, and whether one inhabits or creates a space, as is exemplified by the equivocal line breaks in “To Tell of Bodies Changed”:

  A painter once squared himself against a difficult question
  and said no one could just create
  a landscape,
  but isn’t it true
  that expectation builds a neighbourhood
  and there is nowhere else that you can live.
  As a senior editor at The New York Review of Books, Prikryl has the critical awareness that any strong editor is wont to have, and it permeates her work. The book sifts through and adopts various strategies to confront the poignant quandary of human displacement—not only literal displacement, but the difficulty of being embodied, of asserting one’s presence in the world: “if narrative remains elusive, I think both writer and reader are forced to work to orient themselves, to stay alert, like a foreigner in a new city at night,” she says in her Paris Review interview. Any anxiety around place and inhabitancy in Prikryl’s work is assumed from the outset, worked out, and casually self-aware—the speaker “reason[s] with herself / deliberately” and doesn’t submit to apprehension while “walking one island / or other.” She is accepting, met in her wandering by the comfort of an “old flame / sufficiency” (“New York New York”).

  Thirty Thousand Islands

  Mr. Dialect pauses on a bluff
  twice pink in the spreading lakes,
  his suit bespoke
  and out of style.
  So begins the section “Thirty Thousand Islands,” which reads more like a montage than a sequence; the poems aren’t progressive or directional, but wander back and forth over the island landscape. The passing of time is focal, but not chronological: repetition and recurrence permit the poems to converse without being reliant on one another for a sense of development. Time is confounded and unsystematically inflected to direct our attention to arguably more interesting relations, such as the mediation of oneself with one’s environment, and the meditative acquiescence that wandering entails:

  the pulsing air of the unsayable

  would maybe sense
  how certain belated sounds busy
  themselves restitching its abolished movements.
  Surprisingly, we get a recurring protagonist in “Thirty Thousand Islands.” Mr. Dialect is an outmoded man, a “compulsive translator” parodically composed of “gestures that the artist / oversteps.” We join Mr. Dialect as he journeys by boat between the islands. Distinct by virtue of his foreignness, he breakfasts beside “caramel brunette(s)” and hangs his Parisian shirts “cuff to cuff” in the boat’s hanging locker. He is in a state of paralysis: “The question was for many weeks / should Mr. D do something.”

  Mr. Dialect is reminiscent of polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito figure, who appears in a number of Herbert’s poems as a stoic and often humorous figure navigating a world of moralistic calamity. Mr. Dialect is less insistent, however. He isn’t a vessel for the poet’s didacticism. His dandyism challenges the sort of masculinist heroism that Mr. Cogito embodies. He finds comfort in his quotidian activities, and betrays but a whiff of Prufrockian defeat. He is adrift in the way the poems are adrift, and dawdles about, reflective and tinkering, but never assertive. He is often absent throughout the section; his vague tale is interspersed with poems beginning in a more contemplative and occasional mode: “A set of rocks like mountaintops whose mountainflanks / are plunged in a body of water” and “My mind continued composing its account at night.” An “I” is mingled with the “he” of Mr. Dialect, as though another speaker journeys with him over or through the fragmented islands of the poems. The first poem in the section describes “the other one / who is not upside down / in the lake” and who “sends regrets.” Occasionally, Mr. Dialect himself speaks jarringly in the first person, adding to the stratification of voices through the section, and diluting any semblance of a clear narrative.

  “The poems are, above all, interested in the arbitrary and associative movement of consciousness.”
  Mr. Dialect, whose name suggests the embodiment and importance of local custom and language, is challenged by a competing perspective that winds its way through the poems, one which asserts the failure of language to say anything definitive, and the irrelevance of the islands as distinct locales whose borders must be preserved. One island bleeds into the next, the landscape is abstracted from, and those aboard the boat do not possess a feeling of control because “[t]he water forms a fact / of greater power.” The poem recognizes that the insistence on nationhood and locality—and by extension the human attachment to place and home-making—are human superimpositions, an arbitrary exercise in the cultivation of meaning; in nature, there is only the rock and water’s “immunity (sublime) / to our ongoing / performances.” This “shedding” of particulars is best captured by a poem toward the end of the book:

  Not lakes but islands.
  Not islands but circulars.
  Not circulars but those very small achievements
  that persuade us we are insulated from circumstance.
  Not circumstance but family chronicles
  shedding item by item their particulars
  like desirable women stepping out of their clothes.
  Not their clothes but their parliaments.
  Not parliaments but a national literature.
  Not land surveyors but aeons.
  Not aeons but islands.
  And not lakes.
  “Thirty Thousand Islands” gestures to the islands’ interaction with the elements and the cosmos as a broader network of not-merely-human things. It envisions a place that isn’t insisted upon, “a single undulating island / without, perhaps, the need of a name.” Nonetheless, the long poem is also an elegy for a past place of consequence, and so “let(s) the fallacy of place / live out its lease.” The section rakes over the landscape with its various rhetorical instruments, entertaining contending perspectives with ease, finding that “the answer in the end was / the questioning.”

  The Levity of Legacy

  The After Party takes up the problem of time and the conditional most interestingly. There are poems that pool the past and present, letting them interact with and distort each other. The most striking example of this is the poem “A Package Tour”:

  It’s not untrue to say that Paní Barvíková was a great-grandmother
  or she and three others were great-grandmothers
  although they were unknown to one another
  and to themselves as great-grandmothers.

  Before those four, there were eight. Then sixteen,
  and at thirty-two we could charter a bus (with room
  for their trunks) and tour the Loire, chateaux already then antique.
  The speaker’s collapse of her ancestral past into the ostensible present plays out in an imaginary “costume drama of uncertain date” and emphasizes the friction between anachronistic worldviews. The speaker, presumably a contemporary career woman who finds it important “to do some work of significance,” observes her great-grandmothers with “[p]uddles of rouge under [their] eyes” and struggles to relate to them. At a point, she mistakes her ancestors for other players, even while an intimacy grows between them: “we’ve grown close because now / there’s something close to rivalry between us.” They are her “mothers,” even as she is “their guide,” and they are skeptical of what she offers “besides information.”

  “[‘A Package Tour’] reveals the futility of relying on legacy to make sense of one’s own identity and experience.”
  In this fictional confrontation, a familiar hierarchy persists: the typical, seemingly timeless dynamic of generational division and the difficulty of resolving such differences. The poem challenges the idealistic presumption that meeting one’s forebears might be a romantic, meaningful affair, and explores one’s indebtedness to their cultural and social moment.

  The poem ends when the speaker leaves these women after recognizing that she doesn’t “depend on them to feel entire”:

  I hated to leave them
  I couldn’t refrain from saying
  in their bad marriages.

  And then I was here,
  remembering the ovals of their faces
  like blank money,

  as if this could win me some advantage,
  as if it might incline you to be generous.
  The “gentle claim” the grandmothers lay on her near the beginning of the poem—“From time to time / one of them would touch my hair or take my arm”—amounts to empty currency, “blank money.” The great-grandmothers, too, “Quietly in clusters / … agree their lives meant something regardless” of meeting their great-granddaughter.

  On the one hand, the poem reveals the futility of relying on legacy to make sense of one’s own identity and experience. The speaker finds the encounter inconsequential, and the figures of her past are uninterested in her. By perplexing time and space, and hypothesizing imaginatively, the poem gestures to the overblown significance of legacy. Yet the poem, like virtually every poem in this collection, is not always so decided. The pointlessness of encountering these women, of sharing with them what proves to be unshareable, isn’t utterly meaningless. Their exploited bodies, the “tapestries of politeness” that “hang substantially” between them, the fact that the most educated woman cowers “beside the poise of the French”—these recognitions have import and relevance for the speaker; they provoke a realization. The residues of social injustice and oppression once confronted by her great-grandmothers are shown to have persisted: “plus ça change,” she writes.

  Tumble Poems

  The poems of the first section are diverse and stand-alone in nature, but there are four short poems (what I’ve been calling “the tumble poems”), that appear intermittently and recall one another. They explore the themes of hope, home, return, and forward movement. Characteristically cryptic, they experiment with tautology and are infused with an emotional tenor that much of the collection skives off. Each is titled with a word stemming from the root word tumble, and their deviating etymologies exfoliate the poems’ semantic possibilities in different directions. The first poem, “Tumbler,” is a single-sentence epanalepsis:

  It was too much
  to hope for to
  hope we would know
  when too much was
  too much to hope
  for.
  The second, “Tumbril” (named for the cart used to transport prisoners to the guillotine in the eighteenth century) wonders whether “true hope” can only come “after every hope has lost / its head”—suggesting the bleak possibility of restored hope via literal or spiritual death. “Tombolo” (named for the strip of land connecting an island to the mainland) tells of the evacuation of these “hopes / to this island made of sand” until, eventually, the island is disrupted and “quarantines no hope anymore.” The last, “Tumblehome” (named for the slope of a ship’s hull) kills off this hope at long last, only to “heave it / over the side and drift / alone into the flat grey morning.” Ultimately, at the end of the sequence, the discarding of hope is how the boat stays afloat. The tumble poems are interesting because they build to a resolution uncharacteristic of the other poems in the collection. The abolishment of hope, they claim, is the only way to ensure that “the threat / of ambush by a hopelessness” is kept at bay. This “habit of prudence” is responsible for the speaker and company’s survival.

  I began by treating the tumbler poems as a sequence to unlock—as latches to fiddle with—because I felt they might go somehow to the heart of the book. The tumble poems are complicated by paradox and ambiguity, saturated by periphrastic syntax and disconcerting repetition. Still, one great insight can be pulled from the tumble poems: expectation, the hope of having hope, is what threatens to ambush us; expectation detracts from present and future experience by over-determining the infinite potentialities therein. In this way, the tumble poems affirm what the rest of the collection proposes: there is nothing sacred or absolute about what has customarily been thought to provide human beings with meaning—hope, legacy, tradition, language. We gain solace by relinquishing these things—by letting whatever comes enter in—and the book as a whole is an experiment in this direction, a place where “the suspension of images / must be the very space / of love, its music” (“It Doesn’t Work Out …”).

  “There is an ambivalence about whether place is internally- or externally-derived, and whether one inhabits or creates a space.”
  At best, The After Party is a wonderfully textured feat, a platform upon which the reader might get a glimpse of untethered play and riff off their own set of obsessions and associations. At worst, the poems are self-revelling and frustratingly inaccessible. Nonetheless, the major insight of The After Party is epistemological in nature. Knowledge isn’t plainly discerned, but is either impenetrable or imaginary, decided by each through the arbitrary process of conviction. There is no Deep Truth to be had, no things in themselves. Prikryl’s poetry plays upon the surfaces of projection and presumption. “Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things,” but it isn’t clear that they ever get at the heart of them (“To Tell of Bodies Changed”). All we get is what “flows and thickens” in the face of what we would like to believe is supremely known (“Inverted Poem for the Fluoride Ladies of Pleasant Valley School”). There is a “spectrum of uniqueness” that is experience, perhaps, and that’s it (“Inverted Poem …”).

  Falling hard against Prikryl’s occasionally uncompromising aesthetic does at least one vital thing: it awakens the reader to the reflexivity of process, as both reader and writer. The text, like the poem “Unrequited,” locates the human desire for “the law’s wide dry hands / trying to bucket the truth” and diverts our attention to the creative and chaotic forces alive in the world, ever-subverting our expectations and enriching our wanderings, should we admit them.

  N. Grimaldi breathes, reads, and sometimes writes in Toronto. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto in 2015.

• Poetry Foundation
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/08/charles-simic-reviews-jana-prikryls-poetry-debut-the-after-party/
  Word count: 479

  Charles Simic Reviews Jana Prikryl’s Poetry Debut, The After Party
  BY HARRIET STAFF
  jana-prikryl
  At the New York Review of Books Charles Simic praises Jana Prikryl’s literary debut, The After Party: “Reading some of her poems is like walking into a movie theater in the middle of a film one knows nothing about, trying to figure out what is happening on the screen, irked at first that the answer is not forthcoming, and gradually growing more and more entranced by the mystery of every face and every action, detached as they are from any context.” More:
  There has been so much poetry written in the United States in the last thirty years that it has become difficult for even its most passionate readers, among whom I count myself, to pretend to have a broad, comprehensive view of the thousands of poems that have been published in books and literary magazines over that time. That was not always the case.
  In the 1950s, American poetry was a small pond with a few big fish in it and others of various sizes swimming around them, so it was easy to see who was imitating whose moves, whose progeny were multiplying and whose were looking sickly. Of course, there were others too, sulking on the murky bottom of the pond and keeping their own counsel, but they were by and large invisible.
  The Beat poets changed all that. They made such a splash that even high school kids were reading Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Thanks to their popularity, bars and coffee shops started having poetry readings, with colleges and universities following soon after, inviting other kinds of poets to read as well and offering them jobs to teach creative writing. Today, with thousands of graduates of writing programs publishing collections and still more graduating every year, it’s hard to believe that a book of poems can be completely original, but despite the great odds, it still happens.
  Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its wheels cleaned, lubricated, and its intricate moving parts made to run again. Unlike watchmakers, poets repair their poems by leaving parts behind that after centuries of use have turned out to be unnecessary to their workings. Hard as it is to believe, lyric poets are still tinkering with a contraption thousands of years old, mending it and reinventing it with no desire to call it quits. As they do that, poetry keeps changing while remaining the same.
  And with that, Simic goes on to closely read a few poems from the new volume with further astute observations. More at New York Review of Books.

• Luxury Reading
  http://luxuryreading.com/theafterparty/
  Word count: 662

  QUOTED: "The After Party is loose and maybe a bit uneven, but quite often beautiful. Prikryl’s style is thoughtful, literate, even earthy at times."

  Review: The After Party by Jana Prikryl
  RATING:
  Reviewed by Alexander Morrison

  Unlike the last book of poetry I reviewed, Christine Heppermann’s Ask Me How I Got Here, Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is not particularly narrative. The last third or so of the book, titled “Thirty Thousand Islands,” has some narrative elements, but for the most part the book is built more around form and language and personal history than plot. While that gives Prikryl a considerable amount of freedom to experiment, it also makes the collection a bit more hit-or-miss on an individual level, prone to wild shifts in subject from moment to moment. But Prikryl is an immensely talented writer, and while I never warmed to every poem in the collection, her wit, imagery, and style unquestionably won me over.

  One of the reasons I ended up enjoying the collection so much is Prikryl’s gift for changing up the form of her poems at just the right moment. Many of the book’s poems are longer, mixing art and character and criticism into a lovingly-crafted morass. But just as you sink into her rhythms, she can throw something like “Timepiece” or “Tumbler” in and upend your expectations, forcing you out of your comfort zone with a quick, sharp rebuke of a poem. Over the course of the first two-thirds of the book, Prikryl shows that she can be funny (“Ars Poetica”), intellectual (“Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”), autobiographical (“A Package Tour”), and much more, and while not every poem connected, a fair number of them did. But my mind keeps going back to those brief gut-punch poems that cast a wonderful pall over the proceedings, like “Tumbler”:

  It was too much
  to hope for to
  hope we would know
  when too much was
  too much to hope
  for.

  And then comes “Thirty Thousand Islands,” the linked sequence of 42 untitled poems that close out the collection. Here, Prikryl turns far more naturalistic. The book shifts gears from the playfully humorous (if dark) reminiscence of the opening poems to a more nostalgic melancholy. The natural world is omnipresent in these poems, Prikryl’s keen eye and command of language making even the briefest among them moody and expressive explorations of her world. Though the poems are untitled, the poems beginning, “Not lakes but islands,” or “Red and black” maintain the playful form that made many of the opening poems so gripping but find a bleaker heart that ended up sticking in my head long after I had stopped reading.

  The After Party is loose and maybe a bit uneven, but quite often beautiful. Prikryl’s style is thoughtful, literate, even earthy at times, but even as it gripped me or painted an evocative picture of the landscape, I could never quite escape the book’s morose hidden heart. Filled with looping thought patterns backed up by staggering linguistic control, poems that have to be read and reread to fully unpack as they drive home a mild sense of despair, The After Party is a fascinating reading experience. It is dense and challenging but undeniably powerful, and while about half the poems didn’t particularly speak to me, there are an awful lot that are stuck in my head days later. There are a few I’ve read a dozen times since first picking up the book. The lack of a strong unifying theme may put some readers off who don’t know what to expect or have a harder time with some of the tonal shifts, but overall, I found The After Party delightfully erudite, an engaging tour of Prikryl’s mind.

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