The Nightfields

"Klink writes with exquisite poignancy, an expansive and stark lyric that has become her signature in this collection. The Nightfieldsreminds us that 'to want a simple life/might mean/to have given up//on expectation' yet the collection offers us of the privilege of Klink's discerning and sometimes ruthless eye on what it means to live from that expectation, to live fully among the wreckage and the triumph." --Carmen Gimenez Smith

"Joanna Klink goes toward poetry with her whole life. To me, she is a landscape poet, who draws more than paints. Her poems contain stars and bone; hope and mercy; meteorology and friendship. Instead of plot, there is subplot, allowing language and feeling to run free. Perhaps there is a spiritual dimension, too, with a pilgrimage through cities and grasslands. In our prosaic age, Klink is a completely original poet--symbolic and vatic--rendering the best poems of her life." --Henri Cole

Praise for Joanna Klink:

"In a culture inclined to mistake opacity for depth and stridency for passionate feeling, Joanna Klink has made a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent. She navigates between those most suspicious extremes, despair and ecstasy, without ever seeming to be a poet dependent on extremes. Taken together, her books are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable." --Louise Gluck, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award citation

"[Klink's] poems illuminate the membrane between loneliness and solitude." --Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"Klink writes love poems to nature . . . 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

"[Klink's] work is a record not only of the ecstasy of engagement with the natural world, but also of the mixed and passionately felt consequences of detachment from a noisier, more chaotic world." --Boston Review