The After Party

Praise for The After Party It's unusual to come upon a body of work by a poet hitherto unknown to one and find it a complete, self-contained universe of its own, totally original and separate from current poetic modes. Jana Prikryl's is such a case. I am reminded of Wallace Stevens's title, A Completely New Set of Objects, except that her poetry doesn't really include objects, but is more like a private biosphere subject to its own climate conditions and laws of growth. Her subject is life as it is currently being lived, and the landscapes it traverses. They are like the ones we all know, yet transformed as though by a dream. The After Party is a truly moving book. John Ashbery Nimble, even acrobatic, cutting but never slashing, always clever but never merely so, Prikryl s poems belong to the great line of wit; they make the intolerables of this life--our islanded existence, our mortality--bearable. And what a mind this poet has, self-skeptical but always curious, encompassing declarations and speculations from the winsome to the recondite. We can say to her, delightedly, what she says more sadly: I d put / nothing past you. Stephen Burt Jana Prikryl s debut collection is, to borrow her phrase, unswervingly superb, though it s indicative of this playful, surprising, hyper-smart work that the poet applies it to a caramel brunette s taste in shoes. Prikryl s work is replete with the right, odd detail, and animated by a swift feverish grace. Her lines are beautifully turned, and as at ease with Latinate high irony as Anglo-Saxon idiom. Prikryl has the skill of being interesting, and has composed a book that is not just susceptible to the consolations/of analogy --but is itself a consolation. Nick Laird