The Channel

A daredevil braiding of intimate and historical dramas, Jana Prikryl’s new poems aim to outrun her own “dazzling linguistic agility” (Louise Glück).

In her fluid and inexorable fourth book, Jana Prikryl summons Cordelia’s voice, harnessing the power of King Lear to think back through her family story and see more clearly our contemporary mad kings. Weaving short lyrics through experiments with the dramatic monologue, Prikryl runs tests on her own medium, the English language, the third language she learned as a child after her family fled Czechoslovakia.

The Channel is a book of clashing styles and perspectives, feelings and nationalities, where no voice remains stable for long. The centuries and settings molt from the Bronze Age to Jacobean England to the Cold War to the digital now, as the poetic voice pushes itself into evasive maneuvers, anachronistic digressions, bad jokes, worse puns, desperate expressions of love, and the speaker struggles to escape the roles written for her. These are poems that ask what new language, what reality might live beyond the borders of that role?