★ 08/15/2022
Womanhood, motherhood, and trees are studied by the gimlet eye of Prikryl’s speaker in this powerful collection (after No Matter ). Her keen observations are unsurpassed, interweaving corporeal details with otherworldly imagery, as in “Window Seat”: “musicians grouped on street corners/ playing electrified songs for almost no one/ the dream pressing in as bald as the moon.” The descriptions of trees are particularly strong, tuning into their physical appearance, their response to subtle changes in the air and seasons, and the inner worlds they might contain. A gust of wind, for instance, and “you feel/ for a moment the rustling in lindens, oaks, sycamores/ as they sense what’s been withheld/ for months, that’s when the mature ones/ rustle it off, slip almost/ sexily out of that dress.” Most moving are her reflections on fertility, as in “Alma Mater”: “I line up my stories, not having a child/ the worst thing that nearly happened to me/ and it happened for years, I couldn’t see the moon/ in the sky without shooting dirty looks but once arrived/ the boy the most arduous exacting work/ I couldn’t have done it alone.” These poems are short but deceptively impactful, disarming the reader with their candor and emotional depth. (Aug.)
"Midwood is simultaneously intimate and distanced. It offers us access to dreams and erotic experience; it keeps us at a remove through irony and syntactical oddity. ‘Out in the open trees behave differently,’ Prikryl writes. ‘They stand differently, their posture is different.’ Prikryl’s poems stand differently, too, their posture difficult and delightful."
"[Prikryl's] most recent [book], Midwood , makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of her artistry... Individual poems have such an invulnerable coolness and gleaming angularity that I also can’t help but admire how assuredly they distinguish Prikryl from her contemporaries. Midwood ’s poems do not invite, shock, take stock, allure, or comfort; they 'move through each other’ and, slipping out from under our grasp and our presumptions, go their 'own way.’ They, at every turn, resist us. Perhaps only for poetry could this assessment be considered a point of profound admiration."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Nathan Blansett
"The poems in Jana Prikryl’s third collection are restless and radiant. In this idyllic landscape of lounge and scatter, home is over rooftops and snowbanks, across time and overseas. Midwood is as much voyage as daydream. I can’t wait to read it again."
07/01/2022
Currently executive editor of the New York Review of Books , Guggenheim fellow Prikryl offers a distinctive voice and worldview in her third book (following No Matter ). In the tradition of Emily Dickinson, the best poems depict the world at a slant ("Out of the garment/ of the land— trees and their upholstery"), and poems about love, travel, childhood, and nature abound, with a series of poems each titled "The Noncello" focusing mainly on a river in Italy. A longer string of poems provides continuity to the collection in its celebration of forests, but too many of these poems end flatly ("They're good at being trees"). Throughout, occasional run-on phrases interrupt the general flow, and some metaphors draw attention to themselves with their odd connections (or lack thereof): "Wood-paneled basement like the inside of a tree for delinquent dads." VERDICT The mostly short poems featured here often exhibit lively, inviting language, but too many of the poems focus on description, leaving readers hungry for more narrative, more emotion, or the zinging of Prikryl's best poems. Recommended for larger public libraries and some university collections.—Doris Jean Lynch
"At the heart of Midwood is a violent curiosity that details of the world are drawn into, reemerging changed. Prikryl creates atmosphere with unnerving speed—these poems are almost gothic, though their mood is entirely of the present, and individually they soon had me in their thrall. But the book as a whole is something else again. Finishing it feels like surfacing from a film, a novel, a dream, a series of dreams circling a source ‘refusing to give us / the key because there was no key.’ Midwood is a strange, thrilling collection from a singular voice."
"‘When reserve of this variety / combines with stillness’ the result is Jana Prikryl’s Midwood , the best and most original new book of poems I have read in years. These poems operate like the game of Jenga: each new word and phrase, each fresh formal idea, every startling turn of thought threatens to topple the entire structure. Midwood is daredevil work, at once nerve-racked and careening, ecstatic. It is, as far as I’m concerned, simply how the game is played."
"[Jana] Prikryl’s latest collection finds the poet applying her quicksilver mind to questions of middle age (marriage, motherhood, the passage of time) in a book that among other things tracks the course of one year as the seasons change outside her window."
New York Times Book Review
"Jana Prikryl is a poet of unique gifts: unexpected images, ingenious syntax, and wide-ranging erudition. But whereas others might have settled for armored virtuosity, she has created something rarer and more original—a voice that is witty, ironic, and despairing in the manner of her great Eastern European predecessors and fused with dazzling linguistic agility. Or freedom, we might say. A mutation not unlike Nabokov’s in the vast playground of the English language."
"[Midwood is] a strange, ecstatic, semi-pastoral crack up…that feels almost (but not quite) careening, a work at war with its own sense of control."
Poetry Foundation - Dustin Illingworth
"Though [these] poems may not, at first glance, appear explicitly political—they are brief, loosely punctuated, and contemplative in their approaches to motherhood, middle age, and the natural world—they are works that, in their hyper-specificity of place and setting, actually undermine the grip that borders (of both the national and metaphoric variety) can hold.… [Prikryl] creates a fusion between past and present that serves as a way station between two different sets of selves, two different sets of histories, and two different women. To be in the middle, then, is to embrace the abstraction of the in-between, the indeterminate.… And with Midwood , Prikryl traverses this liminal space with the careful eye of a seasoned traveler."
"A modern, sensitive, and satisfying contemplation of different physical and figurative midpoints…[Prikryl’s poems] are straightforward but linguistically complex, and always elegant in their economy.… These are smart, inquisitive pieces that play with the philosophical underpinnings of language and poetic structure."
Ploughshares - Mandanna Chaffa
