From “a poet of lyric wonderment, angular beauty, and uncompromising vision” (Poetry Northwest), a luminous meditation on loss and love
In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth book, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and asks, What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as “moments of being”: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances lets us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.
“The extraordinary beauty of [Klink’s] poems, from the beginning, has resulted from a constantly refined attention to the ordinary and the daily.” —Louise Glück
“Joanna Klink has given us Rilkean elegies haunted by ‘the love you feel for what you lost.’” —Terrance Hayes
“To open a new book by Joanna Klink is to be dazzled. I come to her always compelling poetry, full of sensual acuity and beauty, as if to an unfailing well. A deft, questing descendant of Rilke, she [writes] an indispensable verse that feels both far-reaching and close at hand...that dares to coax the reader toward a newfound clarity and awe:
Sometimes when the rain at dusk shucks the heat you make a home of rain and are surrounded. You make a home of dust and matches and stay close to the night’s burning boats. The smell of rain falling on dry ground is the sound of all the houses.
Days & Chances is a consistently exquisite book by an entrancing and masterly poet.” —Cyrus Cassells
“Joanna Klink’s elegant and powerful poems seem often preternaturally sensitive to even the most minute shifts of human interiority. Book by book, she has recalibrated the terms of the lyric meditation, letting her exquisitely nuanced deflections of syntax expose those often-shifting layers of instability at the core of experience. This is a poet capable of making luminous those delicate declensions of hope pulsing in our daily lives.” —David St. John
Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, and has received awards and fellowships from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
View titles by Joanna Klink
From “a poet of lyric wonderment, angular beauty, and uncompromising vision” (Poetry Northwest), a luminous meditation on loss and love
In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth book, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and asks, What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as “moments of being”: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances lets us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.
Reviews
“The extraordinary beauty of [Klink’s] poems, from the beginning, has resulted from a constantly refined attention to the ordinary and the daily.” —Louise Glück
“Joanna Klink has given us Rilkean elegies haunted by ‘the love you feel for what you lost.’” —Terrance Hayes
“To open a new book by Joanna Klink is to be dazzled. I come to her always compelling poetry, full of sensual acuity and beauty, as if to an unfailing well. A deft, questing descendant of Rilke, she [writes] an indispensable verse that feels both far-reaching and close at hand...that dares to coax the reader toward a newfound clarity and awe:
Sometimes when the rain at dusk shucks the heat you make a home of rain and are surrounded. You make a home of dust and matches and stay close to the night’s burning boats. The smell of rain falling on dry ground is the sound of all the houses.
Days & Chances is a consistently exquisite book by an entrancing and masterly poet.” —Cyrus Cassells
“Joanna Klink’s elegant and powerful poems seem often preternaturally sensitive to even the most minute shifts of human interiority. Book by book, she has recalibrated the terms of the lyric meditation, letting her exquisitely nuanced deflections of syntax expose those often-shifting layers of instability at the core of experience. This is a poet capable of making luminous those delicate declensions of hope pulsing in our daily lives.” —David St. John
Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, and has received awards and fellowships from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
View titles by Joanna Klink
