Midwood
Poems
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
“Midwood makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of [Jana Prikryl’s] artistry.” —Nathan Blansett, Los Angeles Review of Books
Midwood is a restless and intimate volume from a poet James Wood has called “one of the most original voices of her generation.”
In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl’s careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Womanhood, motherhood, and trees are studied by the gimlet eye of Prikryl's speaker in this powerful collection (after No Matter). Her keen observations are unsurpassed, interweaving corporeal details with otherworldly imagery, as in "Window Seat": "musicians grouped on street corners/ playing electrified songs for almost no one/ the dream pressing in as bald as the moon." The descriptions of trees are particularly strong, tuning into their physical appearance, their response to subtle changes in the air and seasons, and the inner worlds they might contain. A gust of wind, for instance, and "you feel/ for a moment the rustling in lindens, oaks, sycamores/ as they sense what's been withheld/ for months, that's when the mature ones/ rustle it off, slip almost/ sexily out of that dress." Most moving are her reflections on fertility, as in "Alma Mater": "I line up my stories, not having a child/ the worst thing that nearly happened to me/ and it happened for years, I couldn't see the moon/ in the sky without shooting dirty looks but once arrived/ the boy the most arduous exacting work/ I couldn't have done it alone." These poems are short but deceptively impactful, disarming the reader with their candor and emotional depth.
