Our Poem of the Week is ‘Laps’ by Jana Prikryl, from her Faber debut, The Channel.

Jana Prikryl’s poems wrestle with problems of power and selfhood in a style both fluid and inexorable. The Channel, the poet’s fourth collection and her Faber debut, is in deep conversation with King Lear, listening for Cordelia as a person banished from home, whose nearest relations know love only as a form of control. The play depends on her silence, but outside of the play her voice may make us audible to ourselves. These poems contemplate, brilliantly and dynamically, authority familial and cultural, illnesses of mind and of body, flights across borders and languages, on nights lit only by violent storms.

Laps

Moving forward here is hardly possible,
to wade

would mean to penetrate
the element itself

over and over
who does that, no

to move through this you had to learn
to go continually upward

through a column of your own devising
of the new, so

through stillness
push the softness down and down, beneath

it’s never put behind you

Copyright © Jana Prikryl, 2026. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.