The Channel

[ . . .] amazing how stubbornly

we worried wrong, the fates will see you now

like rushes wetly cut from streams and tipped

in flame, or when that girl became a reed

is there a song that won't make use of her


Jana Prikryl's poems contend with displacement and domestic upheaval in a style both fluid and inexorable. The Channel, the poet's fourth collection and her UK debut, is in deep conversation with King Lear, listening for Cordelia as a person banished from home, whose nearest relations know love only as a form of control. The play depends on her silence, but outside of the play her voice may make us audible to ourselves. The book thinks, brilliantly and dynamically, about authority familial and cultural, about illnesses of mind and of body, about violent storms, and flights across borders and languages.