The Channel

Jana Prikryl's poems wrestle with problems of power and selfhood in a style both fluid and inexorable.

The Channel, the poet’s fourth collection and her UK debut, is in deep conversation with King Lear, listening for Cordelia as a person banished from home, whose nearest relations know love only as a form of control. The play depends on her silence, but outside of the play her voice may make us audible to ourselves. These poems contemplate, brilliantly and dynamically, authority familial and cultural, illnesses of mind and of body, flights across borders and languages, on nights lit only by violent storms.