No Matter

An urgent, visionary collection of poems from the author of The After Party
 
“One of the most original voices of her generation.”—James Wood
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE PARIS REVIEW

Jana Prikryl’s No Matter guides the reader through cities—remembered and imagined—toppling past the point of decline and fall. Conjured by voices alternately ardent, caustic, grieving, but always watchful, these soliloquies move from free verse through sonnets and invented forms, insisting that every demolition builds something new and unforeseen. In reactionary times, these poems say, we each 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 disappearing."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 ChiassonJana Prikryl is the author of No Matter and 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 a senior editor and the poetry editor.Got


off a stop early but no harm.

A pleasant walk. This is a different place.

Lady at the counter doesn’t know it either,

no use asking.

Lucky you turned when you did

and saw the ceiling of the Brooklyn Bridge

not ten feet above. Never noticed

the whole thing’s umber, made of brownstone.

How same this town is, same as itself, unyielding.

It gives you time, almost, to make

observations such as this, it draws them out

like the East River pretending

to be a river when it’s merely an appetite.

I’ll take it from here, you think, I know the way.

Just barely convincing.

Then you saw St. Peter’s down below, confirming

this is Dumbo

and thought yes, finally they’ve made it right

with Malta: set forth on the long downward path

of sandy steps a touch too long and shallow

for human locomotion faster than deep reluctance

southwest, Spanish gravel, attractive, toward the church,

when houses on the way start exploding.



Anonymous


Her hair is parted in the center and this side

wall of the house ends just above her part.

The seam between the house and not-­house

seems to rise out of the part in her hair.

Dandelions on the lawn are playing

sundials, their globes give out the time

of year. She’s not smiling so much

as grimacing against the pull of the brush

and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are

her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.



Waves


on the Hudson just a few inches

above the crown of my head, it’s fall but the leaves

as green as the afternoons humid,

they fall from the trees a halfhearted yellow,

unswayed by the unforthcoming change.

How you crossed that island I don’t know,

one of the blasts must have nudged you.

The Hudson is a river though, with genuine water

going one way most of the time, a true expression.

Not much else here, of the city I knew.

The doggerel place, a place you pray

to be delivered from through

not too much exertion of your own.

I designate the gondola

to Hog Island my second home,

may I get carried away in perpetuity.

Deliver me as down along a zip line—­

these piles, these ornate cornices

best seen if not in enlargements of scenes

of Myrna Loy’s xmas eve between

martinis then through the blinds

of function rooms where hopefuls in colorless

uniforms circulate edible miniatures—­

even if the view going down differs

from the view going up.

The city welcomes you.

The cathedral perhaps, its smoking dome

still visible over the charred fastnesses

of Village and East Village,

still visible when I turn.

And here we reach the shores of speculation.