RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksBecause \'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.
Frank Bidart
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksFor Bidart, looking different was pursuant to sounding different. Dynamic, radical enjambment; unconventional typography; expressive capitalization: his poems look, emphatically, like no one else’s. Yet his vers libre intoxicates a reader as much as any traditional prosodic shape: read Bidart aloud and hear how thoroughly a human voice can be \'fastened\' onto the page ... Labor of refinement and clarification, while understandable and noble, does hamper some of the first section’s momentum ... The proximity of the expiration of flesh has made for some of the most affecting poems here, like \'On My Seventy-Eighth,\' whose alternating long and short lines veer between vigorous bel canto and solemn sotto voce ... Against Silence memorably sees our greatest living poet of the flesh expressing and assessing fear of flesh’s end, of dispensability, of desire’s flame dimming to mere flicker ... Bidart, when fearful, is ever careful to remind himself what his poems have long reminded us: \'Come, / give up silence,\' he writes. The poet and reader keen to censor, ironize, or infantilize their own desires will find in the work of Frank Bidart a half-century-long rebuttal.
