[ . . .] amazing how stubbornly



we worried wrong, the fates will see you now



like rushes wetly cut from streams and tipped



in flame, or when that girl became a reed



is there a song that won't make use of her





Jana Prikryl's poems contend with displacement and domestic upheaval 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, but outside of the play her voice may make us audible to ourselves. The book thinks, brilliantly and dynamically, about authority familial and cultural, about illnesses of mind and of body, about violent storms, and flights across borders and languages.



Jana Prikryl is the author of The Channel, Midwood, No Matter and The After Party. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Fondation Jan Michalski, among other honours, she is the executive editor at The New York Review of Books. Prikryl was born in the former Czechoslovakia and raised in Canada. She lives in Brooklyn with her son.