Days & Chances

Quotes

“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. . . . 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)

“This gorgeously textured volume is one of Klink’s finest yet.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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

“[T]he poems present a kind of frosted-glass effect across their subjects as though looking out from a fogged window in late autumn or early winter . . . This collection implores us to keep close record of our own days, our own chances, that won’t return to us, even if they are, at times, unpleasant, because we only get this one, glittering opportunity at existing here. Klink’s collection stands resiliently solid amidst each of its poem’s disappearing, and reappearing, acts like a flag, a little frayed, a little tattered, saying I am still here.”
—Southern Review of Books