The Channel

A volatile concentration of intimate and historical dramas, Jana Prikryl’s new book aims to outrun her own “dazzling linguistic agility” (Louise Glück)

In her electrifying fourth collection, Jana Prikryl harnesses the power of King Lear to look back at her family story and see more clearly our own mad kings, our hunger for authority. Listening for Cordelia as a dissenter banished from home, Prikryl finds that outside her native tragedy the silent woman has more to say. The centuries and settings molt from the Bronze Age to Jacobean England to the Cold War to the digital now, as her voice pushes itself into evasive maneuvers, urgent digressions, bad jokes, worse puns, and desperate expressions of love, and she struggles to escape the roles written for her. What new language, what new reality—these poems ask—is available beyond the borders of any given role?

From “Insomnia at Anchor”:

... the meter tells me who I was

the corridor I paced as Antony

Friends, best hour of school, can’t teach the fates

they couldn’t worry us, reading reassured

a book but carried out your feelings, ferried

away from home, 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