Unreal Cities
No Matter by Jana Prikryl. Tim Duggan Books/Penguin Random House, 2019, $15.00 paper.
IN (2015), the poet Jana Prikryl threw a celebration for the end of the world—or at least her world. She delighted in this imagined end’s combination of humor and grief, in how we inflate minor things and tie them into elaborate, morbid balloon animals. In a reality saturated with death and despair, she leached out the world’s violent colors and left only the pastel hues of nostalgia. In her second collection, , Prikryl still goes on, evidently, and the end has unmomentously not come. Perhaps this world is not nearly so pretty as it once was. It is now muddied in shades of grey. While shares the same stateless characters and endless wandering as , these new poems feel less hopeful, but more accepting. We enter into a world
