The After Party

by Jana Prikryl

"A truly moving book." —John Ashbery

Jana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys 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 ambitious experimentation 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 in Canada, 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 Party marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Literary Fiction

112 pages, Paperback

Published June 21, 2016

About the author

Jana 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.

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first discovered Jana Prikryl in 2019 when I picked up a copy of her second collection, No Matter at a bookstore in Brooklyn, NY. That collection focused a lot on Brooklyn itself, so it felt serendipitous that I'd stumbled upon this new-to-me poet and really connected with her writing. Ever since, I've wanted to go back and read her debut collection. Then just last week when I was in New York again at the same bookstore (different branch) that I found her other collection in, I stumbled upon her debut collection and just had to buy it. For that alone these books will always have a special place in my heart, though unfortunately I didn't love this collection as much as the other I've read.

No doubt Prikryl is incredibly intelligent. Almost perhaps too smart for her reader, one might argue. While at times the layered complexity of her poetry is rewarding once you've cracked open the nugget of truth she's hiding within, many times her poems seem almost impenetrable.

What does come through in this collection is her grappling with grief; the unexpected loss of her brother in 1995 and the aftermath that comes with losing a loved one. She explores borderlines, identity through family history, physical spaces and our identity as humans within them. It's both tangible and liminal.

The second half of this collection is one very long poem that takes up nearly 50 pages. However, it's a quick read as the stanzas are broken out across the pages like tiny islands of obscure meaning. I personally didn't really understand it, but it was still a pleasant read because she's a very playful, conscious writer.

Glad I finally read this one. May be worth revisiting in the future, same with No Matter. Interested in picking up her 2022 release now too!

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Images and Ideas

A seagull at home in this valley steps into air
above the river. I'd like to follow
it holding the wind to account while flinging
itself out into it.

The opening lines of "Argus, or Fear of Flying," the second poem in this collection by Czech-Canadian poet (and NYRB editor) Jana Prikryl. It is a striking image for any creative endeavor, that daring leap into the elements. If Prikryl had developed the bird parallel, say like Hopkins in "The Windhover," I would have been soaring right there with her. But she is a less physical poet than that, abstracting rather than realizing, using ideas as her safety net. The stanza continues in quite a different vein:

[…] Remove in reading
and being in the music when you listen—
not that you moved back but forward into
remove—saw you off a wall patched with lichen,
consortium of air and electric currents
it'd be difficult to itemize
expressing you across the river.
It deepens like a mind accruing images.

The unexpected ambiguity of that word "remove" stops the seagull in its flight. Is it a verb or a noun? It is a withdrawing or surrender? She answers, of course; "being in the music when you listen" pairs the physical image with mental one, and she makes clear that this remove is something you step forward into, not back. The wild "consortium of air and electric currents" is contrasted with the concrete detail of the "wall patched with lichen." Reinforcement or contradiction? Or both at the same time?

"Like a mind accruing images." Reading these poems, I find a constant tension between actuality and idea in Prikryl's work. Sometimes she seems just verbal cleverness, as in this complete poem:

It was too much
to hope for to
hope we would know
when too much was
too much to hope
for.

This is called "Tumbler," perhaps from the glass-half-full image, but more for the way in which the repeated phrases tumble over each other, the sense and line divisions never quite matching. It is one of six variations on similar themes, scattered through the collection like sorbets between the heavier courses: "Tumbler," "Tumbril," "Tombolo," "Tumblehome," "Titoism," and "Timepiece." If Prikryl always wrote in this register, I would write her off as a clever epigrammatist with nothing much to say on the emotional level. But on the back cover, John Ashbery calls this a "truly moving book," saying that the poet inhabits "a complete, self-contained universe of her own, totally original and separate from current poetic modes." What is he seeing that I can't? The detailed analysis with which I began is a first attempt to work it out.

Struck by Ashbery's remark about a self-contained universe, I turned to the forty untitled poems that make up "Thirty Thousand Islands," the second half of this collection. How if I were to read them through without stopping, not worrying what each one might mean, just immersing myself in the poet's world? The physical setting is presumably the archipelago of small islets where the Canadian Shield dips into Lake Huron. But you would not turn to these for nature writing; this is less a place than a rag-edged kingdom of the mind, contrasting ideas of isolation and completeness, home and exile, the ancient and the now:

Samuel de
Champlain drew
circles in lieu
of islands:
pebbles.

Runes littering
an inland sea, had they had
a voice might hymn,
so roundly having been
tucked away.

While I can't say that my visit to Prikryl's islands focused my thoughts very much, it did make it easier to return to the 32 named poems of the first half. Literalist that I am, though, I kept focusing on those that appeared to tie the life of ideas to something more concrete. Though never explicit, some seemed to refer to real-life stories: ancestors, emigration, a new lover, a life-threatening accident to a loved one. Others appeared to be linked to specific places, for example a group in the middle that evoke Italy. Others are sparked by her reading, of Roland Barthes, George Kennan, or an article in Science saying that "New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage… left over from their lives as larvae." Hence her poem "The Moth," a kind of sonnet I suppose, a meditation on memory and a rather beautiful balance of concrete image and poetic fragility:

He'd like to be at one with his new self
but memories sit in him like eyes.

Sometimes scent implies an unheard-of
idea and he's off
but it's just another of the given forms.

You'd think flight would be decent redress,
the power to sift himself through air
and leave each thought in its old place,
where hard feelings also could be left.

He shrugs and the wings
quiver with great precision,
nature will have to live with what it's done;
he cannot manage even resignation without a show of grace.

My Amazon review ended here. But because on Goodreads I can actually illustrate it, I want to quote from one more poem, where uniquely the ideas are tied to a very concrete image indeed, a picture in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. These are the closing lines of "Benvenuto Tisi's Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele":

The deathless ars
longa, vita brevis guys will have me clutch a carved
toy boat but this provincial follower
of Raphael goes for the ocean liner.

Reality's my kind of metaphor.

The heavens circulate with the times on the far
horizon and I don't have anywhere
to be except this unambiguous shore.

This shore and the distant one, hard fact and poetic possibility, reality and metaphor. Personally, I could do with a little more of the former, but it's a pretty good image of the poetic process.

[I received a free copy of the book through the Amazon Vine program.]

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The After Party

The dictionary defines "after party" as "a usually exclusive party or event that takes place after a performance or other event or after a main party." Thus, many years ago I was on the board of an organization that presented a large summer blues festival in a public place. After the festival, we retreated to a small club for what was known as the after party. The term is of relatively recent vintage and apparently was first used in the early 1960s.

"The After Party" is the title and guiding metaphor of this new and first book of poems by Jana Prikryl, senior editor of the New York Review of Books. A small number of the poems are set at parties, but the "after party" metaphor goes deeper. The poems describe a variety of people, places, scenes and activities. The events described in the poems would be the party and the poet's reflections on these first-order events would be the after party.

Following through, the book is in two broad parts. The first, untitled part of the book consists of about 30 separate poems. The poems are set in a variety of places from Italy to New York City, to Canada, to small towns. They are in a variety of voices and cover different stages of life from childhood to age. Many of the poems appear to be autobiographical and reflect upon relationships with siblings, parents, friends, and family. Other poems reflect on historical people, such as "Stanley Cavell [an American philosopher] Pauses on the Aventine" or "The Letters of George Kennan and John Lukas Interspersed with some of my Dreams." Every so often the flow of the poems is interrupted by a short meditation on hope and its possibility, such as in this poem called "Tumbril" (a cart used in the French Revolution to convey victims to the guillotine).

"You have to hope we
soon exhaust all hope because
you sense one final hope
and maybe the true one
can be hoped for only
after every hope has lost
its head."

The poems in this first part tend to be densely written and heavily descriptive which creative word passages, associations, and usages. Many of the poems appear personal, even confessional, but they also exhibit a tough-minded sharp irony. The poems are allusive and usually succinct with every word intended to tell. I enjoyed the language, the description, and the after party reflection in a number of poems, including those about Keenan and Cavell and a poem titled "The Moth". A number of these poems, though, left me cold.

The second part of the book is titled "Thirty Thousand Islands" and consists of a sequence of about 40 untitled, interrelated short poems. The poems are set in an island chain in the Great Lakes which, late in the sequence, is shown to be located in the Canadian section of Lake Huron. Many of the poems are in the voice of or about a somewhat comical, enigmatical figure named Mr. Dialect. In this section too, an after party is involved in the close description of the islands, their history, the cottages, the residents, the lake, the boats, and the surrounding rocks and vegetation. There are comments of the quizzical Mr. Dialect on what he sees, with the reflections on the descriptions constituting the after party. I was reminded sometimes of Henry in John Berryman's long sequence of poems "The Dream Songs". The poems in "Thirty Thousand Islands" tend to be both humorous and melancholy as the reflect on the beauty of nature and on sadness and loneliness. I found the sequence more accessible than the poems in the first part of the volume, and I enjoyed it more.

"The After Party" displays a modernist sensibility in its language, subjectivism, and use of irony. Readers who enjoy modern poetry will be interested in this new collection of poems.

Robin Friedman

[Regan · Rating 1 out of 5]

[I received an uncorrected proof of this collection of poems for an (unpaid) review.]

Jana Prikryl is not a literary nobody. She has been published in several notable literary publications including the Paris Review, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, where she works.

She's praised as writing "nimble, even acrobatic, cutting but never slashing, always clever but never merely so," and this is taken to be "wit." Not to shit in Prikryl's oatmeal, because she definitely has a talent for understated ironies embedded in deftly in poetic lines, but this collection lacks any sort of thematic continuity and a clear authorial voice.

Given a blind test, I would identify her as a glib New York writer, but I think her voice too weak to pick out of the astounding crowd of glib NY writers.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

So the thing with poetry -- at least with me -- is that it's either a home run or a complete shut-out game. I either love it or I hate it. Sadly for me, this book was a swing-and-a-miss.

Nearly every poem in the book made me feel as if I were trying to get a glimpse through a shaded window of a fabulous party to which I hadn't been invited. I just didn't get these poems! I read quite a few of them more than once. I did some research on the long sequence, "Thirty Thousand Islands," that makes up the second half of the book. I begged for an invitation. I pleaded! I tried to sneak in. But no luck!

I'm still not entirely sure why. This is the first work of Prikryl's I've read, but she seems more than competent. Perhaps it is her style, which doesn't necessarily eschew "proper" grammar and punctuation but it certainly doesn't embrace it, either. She's also very fond of repetition, which is not my favorite literary device -- but lines like "Having desired little / more than the // arrival of the little more / that arrives" are not uncommon, and for the most part, they just made my eyes cross.

Perhaps it's the sheer erudition of the poems, the allusions and the references that fly over my head. Several of her poems reference philosophers or paintings or literary works in their titles -- not to mention the poems themselves! And as I said, the entire last half seems to be a meditation on life in the Thirty Thousand Islands region of Lake Huron, to which I am sadly not privy.

But then again, shouldn't a poem, even if the allusions aren't caught and the experiences haven't been lived, provide something to the reader, no matter how ill-prepared he is? Perhaps you don't think so. Perhaps there is no real answer, perhaps a poem simply has to be. But me? I like poems that mean, and I didn't find many of those in this book.

(There was one poem, "The Moth," that I really enjoyed. A shorter poem, it meditates on the scientific hypothesis that some butterflies and moths bring "baggage" with them from their larval stages. For whatever reason, I got an invite to this poem, and I really enjoyed it... which made the time I invested in the book worth it. Hence the two stars!)

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The After Party" by Jana Prikryl is a fairly short book of poetry. I found that this collection of poems was rather odd and not very well written. I know that in the past Prikryl has had poems published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, but I have not read any of her other work. Overall, I was not really impressed. The poems are odd, the titles are a bit strange, such as "Landscaping" and the whole book just gives off the impression that she quickly wrote a bunch of poems and put them randomly into a book. There were only a few lines throughout the poems within the book that really flowed well together and made much sense to me. Thank you to Penguin Random House for sending me an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75 stars

It was all right. "The Moth" and "Geodes of the Western Hemisphere" were the only real standout poems for me. The long poem did absolutely nothing for me. Gorgeous cover though, for what it's worth.

[Lukas Sotola]

While there were a few verses I found memorable scattered throughout this collection, and there are a few poems here that I would like to return to in the future, on the whole, the poems in here were enigmatic to a fault. I’m happy to work through a difficult poem if I perceive that I’m getting a reward out of it, but when there seems to be no logical connection between one verse and another or between one stanza and another, I get frustrated very quickly.

[Mike Heyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

What are we to make of lines like, "Do you dream of walking out / rain or shine / a truffle balanced on your sternum..." or "You pulled up the lawn like a carpet, positioned a new one as you went." Certainly the latter is a metaphor, but like so many of the metaphors in these poems, its meaning is far from clear. As I see it, there are two kinds of poems. There are the poems that speak of the thoughts, feelings and experiences we share, poems that, when I read them I think, "How beautifully said- I wish I could have said it that way myself." There are the poems that, when I've read them, I think, no matter how beautiful their language, "What in the world does this mean?" For me, most of Jana Prikryl's poems are this kind. There are gems in this book, to be sure. "Tumbril" is a neat little meditation on inevitability and fate. "Inverted Poem for the Fluoride Ladies of Pleasant Valley School" is a funny character sketch. "Thirty Thousand Islands," the poem cycle that occupies 40 percent of the book, seems to convey the extensive beauty of The Archipelago in Ontario, Canada and muses upon the varied tourists who visit the region. Overall, however, most of the poems in this book remain as remote and inaccessible as those islands. Like so much contemporary poetry, these poems are so personal, so private, that their meanings and messages will escape many readers. It doesn't help that the author peppers them with names, events, and places that she apparently assumes we will understand, but when they are unfamiliar to us, as many are, they merely add to our confusion. I received my uncorrected proof copy of this book free in a Goodreads giveaway. I'm not sorry to have read it; I just wish I could have enjoyed it more.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually post reviews, but I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of this book, so I'm somewhat obligated to do so. Keep that in mind, though frankly I would've been perfectly happy to be coerced into promoting this anyway.

The After Hours encapsulates some of the best trends of contemporary poetry, making use of various forms and structures to internalize the author's experience of the world. I felt I couldn't always understand quite what the poet was saying, though the work demands a follow-up reading; the layers of imagery and narrative combined to really spectacular effect. When I could relate to the writing, it was fantastic ("The earth has feelings / some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud"). When I couldn't, I was still fascinated and sure that it would yield some greater meaning on a subsequent trial.

To reiterate, the formal variety here was really wide, which I appreciated--a mentor once told me to beware of collections that seemed too attached to one form, and I took it to heart. Her modernized sonnets are really inventive, and I generally like when she plays around with form (the Roland Barthes dialogue is really disconcerting, as it should be).

All in all, definitely a good voice for modern poetry--maybe not for someone who doesn't really read poetry, but surely a recommendation for the token friend or two who actually cares. This book is personal without being navel-gazing, and a little cryptic, but in the best way. Would read again.

Also Jana responded to me on Twitter (twice!), which is cool. She is cool.

[Hannah Diehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over all it was good. I think it could have been better but it was a fun read.

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are poems that form small continents of the impossible. Rather than relying on hand wringing or confessionalism, it blends every together into a few psychic increments and forms a calliope of every color.

To Tell of Bodies Changed Related Poem Content Details

Having desired little
more than the

arrival of the little more
that arrives,

outside our window a cypress
of model proportions.
Its patience seems to widen
the nights we sleep in Rome.

Warm flags draw a tortoise,
it scrapes too near.
Our friends hurry over when they hear,
exclaiming over its mute
resolute
distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee.

Density pours into swallows and shadows:
spilled with abandon each morning,
begins then the slow work
of receding.

The joints announce their new allegiances.
Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things.

Night broken into, it's the sub rosa
singling out
I ought to have expected
from Fra Angelico's small panel
among others,

the souped-up full-spectrum wings
combined with a mood of reverent submission
in both figures
warning of experience
yet to come.

Starting now she'll reason with herself
deliberately
(imagine bulbs expecting stars
for effort!), aware of being always overheard,
subject to unprecedented measures
of integrity, like an author.

While a substance of landscape, mineral,
leaches into blood vessels
quietly steadily, meaning in this case
nothing is damaged;
extravagance of umbrella pines
propping their fingers under the bonus horizons
of the hills, redundancies
boosting the city's resemblance to itself.

A painter once squared himself against a difficult question
and said no one could just create
a landscape,
but isn't it true
that expectation builds a neighborhood
and there is nowhere else that you can live.

It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention
touched the first body alone, a body changed
again precisely to its own form,
a very special intention.

Alloyed
discretion, the grit of a damp trowel
explores my mouth, at leisure
determining
the candor that cavity
is good for.

Generous blurbs can be misleading, but the ones given this poet were not misleading. A must read.

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Disclosure: This book (Uncorrected Proof ARC) was received for free, as part of the Early Reviewer's Program from LibraryThing, however my review is entirely of my own opinion.**

This debut collection of poetry by Jana Prikryl is truly ambitious and gorgeous. The poems are deeply rooted in a sense of place, yet are imbued with motion. There is brilliant and creative wordplay at work, that makes the work a delight to read.

The poet takes us from NYC to Italy, to Eastern Europe, to Canada. With each stop, the reader experiences some of the essence of the place - what it means to be there, to be from there. Within the collection, there is literal movement such as via transportation, immigration, and the flowing of the sea. There is also figurative motion such as the passage of time, and the ebbing and flowing between hope and despair.

The collection is separated into two sections. The first covers a wide variety of topics - family relationships, works of art, Cold War philosophy, and more. If you don't know much about these topics, you might find yourself needing to do a little research as you read. This might deter some readers, but it shouldn't! The second section is made up of over 40 linked poems. They explore the history of the land now known as Canada, its indigenous peoples, the colonists/missionaries/etc., and the effects all three have had on each other.

Overall, the collection is beautifully crafted, and should not be missed!

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am trying to read more poetry because I feel that I've neglected the genre. Usually I appreciate poems but are either not engaged or pushing myself to engage with them. This book of poems allowed me to read poems with enjoyment and honest appreciation of them. I havent been to the area of the Thirty Thousand Islands Ms. Prikryl writes about but I know the Thousand Islands and could identify with her poems about the area. I looked up the painting of Benvenuro Prikryl writes about and found a website with that poem and painting together so I could observe both. I even decided to rewatch Our Hospitality, the Buster Keaton film on which a poem is based. I found the author's poem relatable, fun and touching. Loved this book.

[Danielle Urban · Rating 5 out of 5]

The After Party (Poems) by Jana Prikryl is a collection of poems that will knock readers off their feet and into the book. Traveling to explore, feel, and loose one's self in words so masterfully written. Jana Prikryl's talent shines forth on every page. The work is highly engaging and addictive. I easily finished reading this wonderful collection of poetry under an hour. Each poem has its say and will win over readers instantly. Truly an enjoyable array of words for all. Entertaining, refreshing, and stunning. The After Party (Poems) is a book all will be talking about for a long time to come. Overall, I highly recommend it to readers worldwide.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The After Party, is an interesting collection of poems. Some poems are very short -about one stanza- or longer (a few pages). The idea of this collection seemed very thought out, but the order of this collection didn't flow the way that I was expecting. Some of the poems didn't have that flow that most poems have. Many of them were kind of confusing and very dull. Overall I wasn't impressed with the execution of the book.

[Karen Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway winner.

While several of the poems balanced nuance and style, the collection did not include a memorable zinger that made me want to go back for a second helping, nor did I feel there was a particular authorial voice pervading the works. I hope the author keeps writing and searching for something that could be her specific fingerprint on poetry.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was provided with a free copy of this book so I could give an honest review.

Vivid poetry. The flow of each poem was appropriate. My favorite was the poem in part III as I was able to picture this in my mind from the start.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book from Good Reads.

I like to read poetry when I have a moment to fill in, like in the bathroom. This book is wonderfully written and enjoyable.

[Sesho Maru · Rating 1 out of 5]

so horrible. what a bunch of nonsense. a little of my soul died with each poem.

[Amanda Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, this book reminds me how much poetry and I don't mix, and I don't have any how to rate this collection. Give me some Shel Silverstein or a funny limerick and I'm good, but when I read a serious poem, such as the many featured in this book, I really don't know what to think. I don't know if it's brilliant or not. I feel like poetry is an extremely personal, subjective form of writing, one that I don't have a right to pass judgement on. Although I did enjoy the last line of "Inverted Poem for the Fluoride Ladies of Pleasant Valley School" that said, " I wish I didn't look at people's teeth so much." I won this book via First Reads.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

The After Party by Jana Prikryl left me with more of a feeling or the impression of being than it did a distinct reaction to individual poems. There's a current of accepting the idea of just being that weaves itself through the myriad poems that took me on a journey alongside Prikryl. I appreciated Prikryl's use of language to examine how interconnected we are with one another with all our similarities and our differences as well as with the past, the present, and the future. As I read The After Party I often lost track of the words in an immersion of mood, atmosphere, and emotion feeling rather surprised when I came to the end of the poem.

[Rrisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manifesto of the moment: Every book of poems will receive 3 stars until I encounter the exceptional (8.25.17). It doesn't mean the Prikryl's collection didn't contain exceptional moments, but as a whole I found it inconsistent. I enjoyed the last 1/3 more than the more formal and traditionally structured poems of the initial 2/3. Of course, the poems I enjoy the most are the ones that confuse me the most, which means I'm an exceptional reader.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not simple poetry -- and why should it be? But I found it difficult to slow down and take the poems at the proper pace, so many of them lost me with the density of their language. I was able to see inside some of them, however, or perhaps some of them came inside of me -- either way, it was what I wish from poetry, so I think I will try reading it again in a few months, when life has slowed a little, and see if I may find ways to better connect with Prikryl's work.

[Jee Koh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mannered rather than mesmerizing, it's too clever-clever for my taste. Two poems I really enjoyed are "Pillow" and "The Moth." In them, I feel as if the speaker and I share the same world, and she is showing me something very special in it.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first part, but then when we got to part two, I felt like I lost the plot a bit (as much as you can lose the plot in a book of poetry haha). But this is just the opinion of someone who doesn't read a lot of poetry, so take with a grain of salt!

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Received my copy in a giveaway here on Goodreads!

[Dorcas Cherogony · Rating 1 out of 5]

Takeaway: Sometimes you read a book and it’s only saving grace is it’s pretty cover.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there were some lovely moments and passages, this book felt largely esoteric to me. That said, I'm willing to try again in the future.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was really only one poem I liked in the entire collection. The poems didn’t draw me in.