The After Party Poems [Paperback]

A truly moving book.  —John Ashbery

Jana Prikryl’sThe After Partyjourneys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City,from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitiousexperimentation with style.

“Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection,presents some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices. Rooted in one place that fragments into many places—the remote shores of Lake Huron inCanada, a region with no natural resources aside from its beauty—these poems are an elegy that speaks beyond grief.

Penetrating, vital, and visionary,The After Partymarks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.ANew York TimesBest Poetry Book of the Year

“Remarkable. . . . Unusually vivid. . . .  Brilliant and funny. . . . A sensory autobiography that examines tragic material with a friendly scrutiny. . . . Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have an independent intelligence.” —Dan Chiasson,The New Yorker

“Prikryl’s debut is a gratifying demonstration of (among other things) the warmth and wit of poetry’s formal architecture.” —David Orr,The New York Times

“Delightful. . . . Marvelous. . . . The poems inThe After Partyhave a quality of attention, a presence of a probing intellect alert to the strangeness of our lives as well as our own estrangement from ourselves.” —Charles Simic,The New York Review of Books

“Potent and pleasing. . . . A poet’s debut elevates the everyday and nods to influences from the past. . . . Jana Prikryl’s readers will quickly discover suclCD