Fully-Inhabited Voice: Jump Hurdles and Czech Immigrants

fully-inhabited voice: I picture the careful lawns of Ancaster and Dundas where Jana Prikryl grew up, according to Hamilton Spectator. The After Party is Jana's first book or poetry, and it came out last summer, impressively, with its metrical feet strong and sure enough not just to walk at birth but jump hurdles. ... one of those rare debut volumes ... in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice, wrote Paul Scott Stanfield in Ploughshares. We're there, I think, in the dwarf maple and floating albino basketballs of hydrangea in Ontario Gothic, the first poem in The After Party. The reviews everything from The New York Times to The Paris Review and The New Yorker have been unanimously superlative. Jana and her family, Czech immigrants, arrived in Hamilton when she was six. John Ashbery, a towering figure in American verse, compared her to Wallace Stevens, calling the book a complete, self-contained universe of its own, totally original and truly moving. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.