Honor Moore
As if her very breathing were integral to landscape, Joanna Klink surrenders utterance and feeling in a place where snow sifts for hours toward the earthline, where the mineral winter makes a dull / math of cold inside the bones. Read these radiant poems as notes from a wilderness where human destiny pulses in time with vast circadians at the edge of consciousness, where silence has the eloquence of stars behind the snow / burning in ancient immanence over the field. Here is the real world, the poet insists: the holding in / of all these breaking things.
Linda Gregg
Joanna Klink has the audacity to write about the happiness of the ordinary in the language of the ecstatic. Her intensity makes the world visible.
Dean Young
In this, Joanna Klink's remarkable second book, the meditative sounding of the human pang, its need for intimate connection and its contrary need for the clarities of solitude, reminds us that precision is a cutting edge that creates dazzle. With a Dickinsonian desire for a meeting of minds and a reverence for the natural world that is tried by an awareness of mortality and ecological peril, these poems remain alert to the reparations of beauty and song, formally elegant, urgent and moving.
From the Publisher
"Klink writes love poems to nature...This is beautiful writing, and it's also very American. Walt Whitman might find something to envy in the way Klink's more gentle sense of song tumbles out of simple, individual acts of attention."—Chicago Tribune
"Eliot's Four Quartets comes to mind, but I think Circadian bears a closer kinship with Rilke’s Duino Elegies via its gorgeous, anguished calls toward the space beyond language, or before it.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books
“[Circadian] urges readers into the responsibility of attention while also warning us that once we open our eyes, we are no longer able to choose the depth in which we will be engaged; the light simply fills them, and we are forced to abandon in any measure of how much pain we might witness.”—American Book Review