“After winter she still had stiff meat when they grafted her into wood by hand“, and so here begins a sensibility of imagery and action with Jana Orlovás poetry. Orlová uses raw statement and form to create a resonance within the reader that goes beyond the minds interpretations of what is on the page before one. She uses an emotion free experiential poetry that is both strong and straight up, with tones of the spiritual and mystical, reaching out from the dark within the lines. Orlovás poetry acknowledges the world and its reality, performing between taboo and transgression. She presents to us existence, fleeing the ideal for the real, to echo not yet understood thoughts and feelings that can be gotten when one reads this poetry or experiences the erotic/moment. With a clarity that obscures the true depth of the poetrys meanings, be taken by the hand of the poet and “imagine you could break the skin of paradise” and be released onto these coming pages to experience Orlová perform magic with words.
 
- Colm Kiernan
 
Performer, artist, university teacher, poet, academic... these are some of the characteristics that try to describe the cosmopolitan artist of Czech origin, Jana Orlová. In the case of her work, the individual and perhaps unnecessarily binding categories are connected by imperceptible seams, often overlapping and even layering. Painting mixes with movement, photography with verse. The poetry is literally physically experienced. The search for the intersections between different modes of the most raw expression could then define the essence of her work. During this search for the poetic form of reality, everything is masochistically honed to the core, and it is certainly not a search for shortcuts or comfortable paths. The medium through which the words and images flow is the human body, which in both its female and male forms provides shelter for the intellectual soul and ample space for desires and urges.
 
Jana Orlová's intimate, passionate, ironic and at the same time strongly intellectual poetry is represented in magazines, in multilingual anthologies, and above all in three collections of poetry written in her mother tongue. In 2012 she published her self-illustrated collection Sniffing the Fire, five years later a second collection of poems, Újedě, and in 2022 You Won't Run Away. The spare, dense verse, often assembled into a single stanza, does not lend itself to arranging poetic devices into abstract images, nor does it require deciphering complex metaphors or multiple readings from different perspectives. It is always a succinctly commented given with a punchy, often shocking conclusion. An unmistakable poetics based primarily on self-awareness, defiance and radicalism runs through all the collections.
 
The process of self-awareness from unbridled nature reaches first the interior, then the interior of the lyrical subject. In the course of the journey, one trips over roots, dodges gnarled branches, lies on stones, and advances through the dark forest with illuminating torches. Even the moon does not rise when it is needed. In the collection Sniffing the Fire in particular, one searches for the hidden rhythm of the night, which mercifully does not obscure but instead exposes shadows and chimeras. The soil in which it buries itself, however, is in places, moreover with a bit of hope, restored to fertile soil. It sticks to the hands, adheres to the hair, dusts the feet. This collection also contains the motifs of real and metaphorical hunger and real and imaginary thirst, or their quenching or quenching. It is about biting, tearing, devouring, sometimes even man-eating swallowing, gobbling, spitting. Desiring hands and mouths are filled and emptied in a rhythm similar to a conversation between poetic partners.
 
This poetic defiance of Jana Orlová appears in the tension between the elements, especially between fire and water. The polarisation of the male and female elements, outlined by psychoanalysis, is broken into pieces in the texts and deconstructed in the name of eroticism. The fascination with flames is evident, as well as with the soaked bathtub beckoning for a plunge. In one of the poems, "Smoke and shadow flow into the sea". The earth takes on the appearance of charred stubble, the smoke from chimneys no longer evoking home. The fluids depicted in the poems are certainly not reduced to water in pools or raindrops. The poetry collection Újedě beckons one into the trap of a walled interior, an imaginary refuge-den, but one that easily turns into a wrestling ring. In it, liquids as ingestible as wine or coffee, as well as bodily fluids in the form of blood, semen, urine, tears, bile, sweat, and saliva, affect the senses of those involved. Few would look for that elusive feminine principle here, and the author of the poems has subjected it to extensive research, especially in terms of what has been written about female sexuality and how it has been reported by women authors. Fleeting feminism does not highlight the over-achieved efforts at emancipation. The grandmother in one of the stanzas picks up chicken droppings with her bare hand, which the next generation has already rejected; the great-grandmother has a lover, but the granddaughter already realizes that a lover is not necessarily a partner. She decides not to waste her feelings for a change and, with a little cynicism, to concentrate on the substance.
 
However, one can find a certain readerly awkwardness in thinking about gender at all. In particular, the most recent and most introspective collection so far, You Won't Run Away, pulses with a radicalism that questions the limits of one's own and others' freedom, as well as the limits of what else can be communicated through writing. Jana Orlová's poems are sometimes read by literary critics as a fundamental representation of contemporary national queer poetry, exemplified by Ángelo Néstore's Poesía Queer Traducida: Checo, a collection of Czech authors translated into Spanish, published in 2024.However, the occasional admitted agender perspective (in the poem "Soul Has No Gender", one of the poems in the set You Won't Run Away, mentions it), or a certain gender confusion, can be seen as an androgynous experience representing both perspectives simultaneously, in addition to a strained passion. In this spectrum, as in the case of the representatives of the first European avant-gardes of the early last century, the subject splinters to cover the entire breadth of reality. There is an insistent need to dismantle oneself into miniature fragments in order to reassemble oneself comprehensively. To put it in the words of Álvaro de Campos, one of the heteronymous alter-egos of the well-known Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa: "To feel everything in every way." And if earthly life is primarily a bodily experience, then the all-encompassing poetic experience includes all bodies, or rather, through these bodies everything else can be perceived.
 
- Karolína Válová