But having braked all the way to the floor of the valleyit dawned on us the slope we’d have to climband it was night, you on the back of my bikewe’d passed the place that burned down—the peoplerich enough to continue to produce some kindof banquet, placing candles and dishes, in the ashesbeyond roof—so you said let’s go home, but lookthe hill we came down is as steep as the hill ahead of us
A Banquet
Jana Prikryl
Feature Date
- March 29, 2022
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Copyright © 2021 by Jana Prikryl.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jana Prikryl’s third book of poems, Midwood, will be published in August 2022. She is the author of The After Party (2016) and No Matter (2019), and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in the former Czechoslovakia and having grown up in Canada from the age of six, she is the executive editor of The New York Review of Books.
Winter 2021
New York, New York
Editor
Emily Stokes
Managing Editor
Kelly Deane McKinney
Poetry Editor
Srikanth Reddy
Since its founding 1953, The Paris Review has been America’s preeminent literary quarterly, dedicated to discovering the best new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Review’s renowned Writers at Work series of interviews is one of the great landmarks of world literature. Hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable interviewing project we possess,” the series received a George Polk Award and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. With the December 2016 redesign of the Review’s website, the complete digital archive of everything we’ve published since 1953 is available to subscribers. In November 2017, the Review gave voice to nearly sixty-five years of writing and interviews with the launch of its first-ever podcast, featuring a blend of classic stories and poems, vintage interview recordings, and new work and original readings by the best writers of our time.
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