No matter Poems

Review by Booklist Review

Echoing her dynamic debut collection, The After Party (2016), a book praised by John Ashbery as truly moving, Prikryl continues to travel circuitously within her unique landscape. These 67 poems, each with a single-word title, do not reveal themselves casually; close attentiveness is needed. Prikryl is rooted in shared experience and writes in an intimate observational tone as she considers our fraught culture. Her poetry is exacting and tough, yet compassionate and solicitous. For example, ""2016,"" a riotously emotional poem, ends: Mud and dust and stuff I can't describe / push his feeling deeper as he grows. / My memories all feel like news / as if I've been good at getting them wrong. Seven poems are titled ""Waves."" in one, she writes: Waves the unstable ones, burn up / and fall down, consuming / themselves, theirs the permanence . Prikryl's focus elegantly pivots in and out of hushed encounters in poems that, with careful reading, gracefully astound.--Raúl Niño Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this atmospheric second collection, Prikryl (The After Party) catalogues an urban dreamscape full of unexpected revelations and slow transformations. Titles often serves as the opening lines of poems, lapsing into contemplation the way a city wanderer might examine each passing street: "Little York, every great/ city leaves a little city in its wake." Repeated titles ("Anonymous," "Waves," "Sybyl") create a strange, lulling music as Prikryl's poetic line shifts deftly from stream of consciousness to piercing insight. Many of these poems grow to a point in the style of lyric essays. "Upper East Side's where you want to cultivate friends," the speaker declares in "Stoic:" "In this city friendship's/ the main mode of disaster prep./ Basements and subbasements busy/ with boilers...." But lest the poems appear merely rhetorical, Prikryl delivers poignant closure: "I found it in myself because I had to,/ the one or two things that/ make it endurable here, and what they/ boil down to is indifference." Elsewhere, Prikryl's forms innovate to invoke their topics, as in one of several "Asylum" poems, in which the speaker battles insomnia with attention to actual things--"like when I can't sleep I say to myself/ the the the the/ the." In this striking book, readers are privy to a mind's ongoing conversation with New York. (July)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In her second volume of poetry (following The After Party), Prikryl, poetry editor of the New York Review of Books, uses the trope of the urban, of cities in decline, to show readers that even deterioration can lead to something useful and unexpected. The poems use form, invented form, and free verse and carry single-word titles, with some titles repeated. "Anonymous," in which "The whitecaps blink like second thoughts," appears most often, and "Sibyl" recurringly references the ancient Greek prophetess who foretold of holy sites. Perhaps all decaying cities are holy? But we're getting ahead here; these poems aren't easy to pin down. Prikryl's language is often fragmented, obscuring meaning, which leaves readers to search and consider. Perhaps this is the point of art--and Prikyl's point: we see what we need to see, what we must. VERDICT As when reading John Ashbery, readers here will need to give themselves the words, allow magic to happen, as when walking up the street "was to be rinsed,/ to lean into the current and hear/ its drowned voices, hear the one voice just stating the obvious."--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

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Got off a stop early but no harm. A pleasant walk. This is a different place. Lady at the counter doesn't know it either, no use asking. Lucky you turned when you did and saw the ceiling of the Brooklyn Bridge not ten feet above. Never noticed the whole thing's umber, made of brownstone. How same this town is, same as itself, unyielding. It gives you time, almost, to make observations such as this, it draws them out like the East River pretending to be a river when it's merely an appetite. I'll take it from here, you think, I know the way. Just barely convincing. Then you saw St. Peter's down below, confirming this is Dumbo and thought yes, finally they've made it right with Malta: set forth on the long downward path of sandy steps a touch too long and shallow for human locomotion faster than deep reluctance southwest, Spanish gravel, attractive, toward the church, when houses on the way start exploding. Anonymous Her hair is parted in the center and this side wall of the house ends just above her part. The seam between the house and not-­house seems to rise out of the part in her hair. Dandelions on the lawn are playing sundials, their globes give out the time of year. She's not smiling so much as grimacing against the pull of the brush and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one. Waves on the Hudson just a few inches above the crown of my head, it's fall but the leaves as green as the afternoons humid, they fall from the trees a halfhearted yellow, unswayed by the unforthcoming change. How you crossed that island I don't know, one of the blasts must have nudged you. The Hudson is a river though, with genuine water going one way most of the time, a true expression. Not much else here, of the city I knew. The doggerel place, a place you pray to be delivered from through not too much exertion of your own. I designate the gondola to Hog Island my second home, may I get carried away in perpetuity. Deliver me as down along a zip line--­ these piles, these ornate cornices best seen if not in enlargements of scenes of Myrna Loy's xmas eve between martinis then through the blinds of function rooms where hopefuls in colorless uniforms circulate edible miniatures--­ even if the view going down differs from the view going up. The city welcomes you. The cathedral perhaps, its smoking dome still visible over the charred fastnesses of Village and East Village, still visible when I turn. And here we reach the shores of speculation. Excerpted from No Matter: Poems by Jana Prikryl All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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