Jana Prikryl

A Richer Sense of Humanity

“History is as potent a presence as myth.”

The Mechanic

“Ideally, a poem should happen to the reader.”

Where the Mistery Lurkes

“Change remains the lifeblood of literary tradition.”

Unheard Melodies

“I think narrative is underused in poetry, but I also think I understand why it’s underused—it became exhausted.”

Making It Real

The year in poems

Fighting Words

“Everybody in Russia who opposes the invasion is fighting at the cost of their lives and their freedom for a future without war and dictatorship.”

Unknown Sources of Lift

“I think there’s an understandable but perilous tendency to conflate art and artist when the artist in question uses autobiographical elements in their work.”

Why Not Film What Happened?

On the films of Joanna Hogg

A Hunger for Form

Elliott Green’s paintings appear to be in continuous motion, the way animals, plants, and ultimately rocks and mountains are in continuous motion, even when our human vision fails to apprehend it.

Thirty Thousand Islands

a poem

Through the Regime’s Looking Glass

Jaromil Jireš’s 1970 film ‘Valerie and Her Week of Wonders’

Pillow

On Thomas Struth

One of the remarkable lessons of the photographer Thomas Struth’s forty-year career is what great range—and how expressive a style—is available within an approach that aspires to complete neutrality.

Waking Up at the Movies

Pauline Kael’s life and criticism

The Genius of Buster Keaton

How to Beat a Dead Octopus

It’s been argued that poetry is an ailing art—indeed, National Poetry Month itself often seems to me a defibrillator desperately applied to the limp body of lyric poetry, while the world’s novels and memoirs and tweets and video games mill around, loud, vertical, and indifferent—but reading the last five decades of poems in the *Review* is a pretty good antidote to such anxieties.