Join Jana Prikryl and Nick Laird as they discuss Jana’s restless and intimate volume of new poetry. 

Midwood is the new collection from a poet James Wood has called “one of the most original voices of her generation.” 

In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of mid-life, 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 seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl’s careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time.

With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment. 

“Jana Prikryl is a poet of unique gifts: unexpected images, ingenious syntax, and wide-ranging erudition.” – Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 

Jana Prikryl is the author of two previous poetry collections, The After Party and No Matter. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, among other honours, and the executive editor of The New York Review of Books.