Midwood

In her brilliant third collection, acclaimed poet Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when the past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written mostly in the early mornings of the first COVID-19 lockdown, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and necessary directness, these poems find a new voice for confronting our moment.