Synopses & Reviews
"A truly moving book." —John Ashbery
Jana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City, from
ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua
francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the
tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitious experimentation with style.
“Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection, presents
some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices. Rooted in one
place that fragments into many places—the remote shores of Lake Huron
in Canada, a region with no natural resources aside from its beauty—these poems are an elegy that speaks beyond grief.
Penetrating, vital, and visionary, The After Party marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.
Review
“Remarkable....Unusually vivid....Brilliant and funny....A
sensory autobiography that examines tragic material with a friendly
scrutiny....Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have
an independent intelligence.” Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
Review
“The year’s most impressive debut.” Flavorwire
Review
“Delightful....Marvelous....The poems in The After Party
have a quality of attention, a presence of a probing intellect alert to
the strangeness of our lives as well as our own estrangement from
ourselves.” Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
Review
“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
Review
“Potent and pleasing....A poet’s debut elevates the everyday and
nods to influences from the past....Jana Prikryl’s readers will
quickly discover such rueful humor is typical of her understated
sensibility....Prikryl is most fascinated by the unpredictable zigs
and zags of an imagination in motion, and language’s laughable (but
reliably amusing) incapacity to map that course precisely.” Joel Brouwer, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Jana Prikryl’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor. She lives in New York.