Jana Prikryl, _The After Party_

SORRY TO KEEP pulling this dodge, but I hope to write about this one elsewhere, too. I've been waiting to get this book for a while.

 It must have been a year or so ago I started noticing poems by Prikryl in places that do not publish a lot of poems, and seem to prefer poems by well-established poets at that: New York Review of Books, The Nation, New Yorker, London Review of Books. I liked the poems a lot, so I went looking around to see what books were available, but to my surprise, she had not published a book yet.

So who was this newcomer who had cracked the lineup in publications given to publishing Ashbery, Graham, Pulitzer prize winners, and such?

There turned out to be a book forthcoming in 2016. I pre-ordered it, it duly arrived early this summer, and it's very good. Given how visible her periodical publications were, though, I was surprised again in seeing that her book came out with a publisher I had never heard of, Tim Duggan Books, which sounded like the smallest-of-the-small presses.

Wrong! Tim Duggan Books "was founded in 2014 and is committed to the highest standard of storytelling across a range of genres," according to its website, and is part of the Crown Publishing  Group, which in turn is part of Penguin. As near as I can tell, Tim Duggan Books does not concentrate on poetry, or even on the particularly literary.

So, how did The After Party wind up with Tim Duggan Books? I find myself wanting to know.