No Matter
Poems
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An urgent, visionary collection of poems from the author of The After Party
“One of the most original voices of her generation.”—James Wood
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE PARIS REVIEW
Jana Prikryl’s No Matter guides the reader through cities—remembered and imagined—toppling past the point of decline and fall. Conjured by voices alternately ardent, caustic, grieving, but always watchful, these soliloquies move from free verse through sonnets and invented forms, insisting that every demolition builds something new and unforeseen. In reactionary times, these poems say, we each have a responsibility to use our imagination.
No Matter is an elegy for our ongoing moment, when what seemed permanent suddenly appears to be on the brink of disappearing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this atmospheric second collection, Prikryl (The After Party) catalogues an urban dreamscape full of unexpected revelations and slow transformations. Titles often serves as the opening lines of poems, lapsing into contemplation the way a city wanderer might examine each passing street: "Little York, every great/ city leaves a little city in its wake." Repeated titles ("Anonymous," "Waves," "Sybyl") create a strange, lulling music as Prikryl's poetic line shifts deftly from stream of consciousness to piercing insight. Many of these poems grow to a point in the style of lyric essays. "Upper East Side's where you want to cultivate friends," the speaker declares in "Stoic:" "In this city friendship's/ the main mode of disaster prep./ Basements and subbasements busy/ with boilers...." But lest the poems appear merely rhetorical, Prikryl delivers poignant closure: "I found it in myself because I had to,/ the one or two things that/ make it endurable here, and what they/ boil down to is indifference." Elsewhere, Prikryl's forms innovate to invoke their topics, as in one of several "Asylum" poems, in which the speaker battles insomnia with attention to actual things "like when I can't sleep I say to myself/ the the the the/ the." In this striking book, readers are privy to a mind's ongoing conversation with New York.
