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.
There’s a special delight in Prikryl’s concentration on what is outside her window, the changes from season to season, the repetitions, and what is rooted and roots us, if we allow it to do so...It’s both a poetic act, and a necessary one, especially in our fragmented times...It feels almost radical to take the gaze away from the greater calamities of the wider world and from technological tethers, and engage with that which is 'doing its thing'...We are enjoined to remember our own seasonal selves, our own constant, assertive emerging, to be passionately, committedly, here.
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.
