No Matter: Jana Prikryl and Dan Chiasson

An urgent, visionary collection of poems from the author of The After Party

“One of the most original voices of her generation.”—James Wood

Jana Prikryl’s No Matter guides the reader through cities—remembered and imagined—toppling past the point of decline and fall. Conjured by voices alternately ardent, caustic, grieving, but always watchful, these soliloquies move from free verse through sonnets and invented forms, insisting that every demolition builds something new and unforeseen. In reactionary times, these poems say, we each have a responsibility to use our imagination.

No Matter is an elegy for our ongoing moment, when what seemed permanent suddenly appears to be on the brink of disappearing.

Jana Prikryl is the author of 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.

Poet and critic Dan Chiasson is the author of five books of poetry: The Afterlife of Objects (2002), Natural History (2005), Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (2010), Bicentennial(2014), and Must We Mean What We Say: A Poem in Four Phases (forthcoming). A book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, was published in 2006. He is the poetry critic for The New Yorker and writes regularly for The New York Review of Books. He has received the Whiting Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the Lorraine C. Wang professor of English at Wellesley College.