Midwood: Poems
by
56/99
Critics
4/99
Readers
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Scholars
96/99
Rating
15/99
Volume
4/99
Rating
4/99
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About This Book
Midwood is a restless and intimate volume from a poet James Wood has called "one of the most original voices of her generation." In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.
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Reviews
"Because 'the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,' as Chaucer observed, it's all the more impressive that the poet Jana Prikryl has published three books in the last six years — and that her most recent, Midwood, makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of her artistry...These poems proceed with an insouciant, therefore charming etiquette; they have up their sleeve a sleek and adventurous and riveting sense of that thing many poets don't even presume to attend to anymore: enjambment...If Prikryl has forfeited the elegant tristesse of The After Party and the ambient grime of No Matter, she has claimed for Midwood a rewarding dailiness."
"With Midwood, Prikryl traverses this liminal space with the careful eye of a seasoned traveler."
"Womanhood, motherhood, and trees are studied by the gimlet eye of Prikryl's speaker in this powerful collection...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...These poems are short but deceptively impactful, disarming the reader with their candor and emotional depth."
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