Jana Prikryl

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...

Jana Prikryl's poems wrestle with problems of power and selfhood in a style both fluid and inexorable. The Channel, the poet's fourth collection and her UK debut, is in deep conversation with King Lear, listening for Cordelia as a person banished from home, whose nearest relations know love only as a form of control. The play depends on her silence,...