DAYS & CHANCES
SELECT POEMS
REVIEWS
“This dazzling sixth offering from Klink applies a fluid and delicate touch to the imminent loss of the poet's father, memorializing the prairie landscape they shared ... Her father's decline – he has lost his sight and, with it, the will to live – is measured against the happiness of the poet's late marriage and the beauty of the endangered world ...This gorgeously textured volume is one of Klink's finest yet.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
“The carefully crafted poems in this collection explore the porousness of the boundary between inner life and external phenomena, articulating how an individual can seem grounded in space and time as a discrete being yet also be at one with the world. “Some days I am so filled with myself / I can see nothing,” one poem begins, but “Some days I’m nothing more than hearsay, / a story read back to me that makes no sense,” another muses. Klink is attuned to the ways that both nature and social environments can be suffused with memory, longing, and foreboding. Her curiosity and tenderness toward other entities, whether human, animal, or plant, is sharpened by a feeling of terminal separateness from them.”—The New Yorker (Best Books of 2026 So Far)
“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.”—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