Prikryl, Jana

Jana Prikryl was born in the Czech Republic and moved to Canada at the age of 6. She works as an editor at The New York Review of Books and is the author of three books of poems: Midwood (W. W. Norton & Company), No Matter, and The After Party. In Midwood, her latest collection, Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, a space in which past and future blur in equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but irreverently explores love, sex, marriage, and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over 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. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.