No Matter: Poems

Description

An urgent, visionary collection of poems from the author of The After Party Jana Prikryl's No Matter argues for the necessity of vision in a time of darkness. Set in cities toppling past the point of decline-and-fall--Rome, London, Dublin, and most of all New York--these poems capture the experience of being human in the late days of empire, when the laws protecting weak from strong are being torn away. Ranging from free verse through sonnets and invented forms, Prikryl's poems insist that every demolition also builds something new and unforeseen. In poems whose one-word titles give the book a percussive rhythm, Prikryl gives voice to the shifting anxieties and fortitude of the powerless. An ancient Sibyl is the presiding spirit, tired of being the conscience of a people addicted to ancient codes of domination. Dido gets the last word on the male lust for conquest. The American tradition of self-reliance shrivels into the narcissism of the survivalist. Scraps of Moby-Dick, Coriolanus, Virginia Woolf, and Heraclitus drift through the poems like ghosts. New York City is taken hostage by the super-rich, and a scramble for resources infects each relationship. Yet the city's glamour and importance can't be denied- there are love poems for friends, for David Bowie, for all kinds of new arrivals who make every city worth saving. In reactionary times, these poems say, we all 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 collapse.

JANA PRIKRYL is the author of The After Party, which was one of The New York Times's Best Poetry Books of the Year. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, where she is the senior editor for poetry.

"One of the most original voices of her generation has produced a second brilliant book. These poems, urban and urbane, offbeat and stringent, welcome the reader with a beguiling lucidity; but that sparkling surface, as in the best John Ashbery poems, hides an obliquity that turns out to be provocative and sometimes complexly self-unraveling. Nothing is quite as it seems-'like the East River pretending / to be a river when it's merely an appetite'-and the world is estranged and transfigured in this enchanting work. My idea of the good life would be a new Jana Prikryl poem, served daily with my breakfast, till the end of my days." -James Wood "No Matter sounds, to me, like the way we live now. . . . Prikryl is someone who came to New York as an adult, and her demographics inform the emotional life in her work - just as they did with Whitman."-Stephanie Burt, Harper's "Prikryl is a shrewd and delicately severe writer with a remarkable gift for observation-'Salon' is the definitive take on the sociology of getting your nails done, and the poems titled 'Anonymous' are dry, precise sketches of old photographic portraits in which the tone is so even you could build a tower of dominoes on it."-David Orr, The New York Times "Welcome Prikryl to the club of great New York City poets. Everything about her verse unsettles: the surprising line breaks, the slightly off-kilter syntax, the shifts from philosophical lyricism ('seeing / with sudden candor, which is / to unsee time') to technological absurdism: 'And do you suppose if there'd been phones that / Dido would have chilled, monitored his posts / as he sailed into a storm . . .'"-Anthony Domestico, Commonweal "Prikryl remains one of the few poets who could make the next ten years uncomfortable."-William Logan, The New Criterion "No Matter is one of the most original, bracing & unsettling books I've read in years. Its voice is mesmerizing but in a calm unnerving way. Its vision slant & riveting. And the mind at work sees into the unseen & is staggering."-Jorie Graham, via Twitter "Prikryl is my favorite poet among my own contemporaries. She writes about being a soul in the circuitry of the 21st-century city. Her gifts include perhaps the rarest one among contemporary poets-wit, which in these poems turns out to be a survival skill."-Dan Chiasson