Joanna Klink is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent book, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, was published by Penguin in 2015. About Klink’s poetry, Louise Glück has written: “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. The extraordinary beauty of her poems, from the beginning, has resulted from a constantly refined attention to the ordinary and the daily. Taken together, her books are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable.”
Klink’s previous books include Raptus (Penguin 2010), Circadian
(Penguin 2007), and They Are Sleeping (University of Georgia Press, 2000). Her poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including Paris Review, A Public Space, Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry, and Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Her fifth book of poems is forthcoming from Penguin in 2020. The book includes a sequence of poems called Night Sky, based on the chambers of James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Irma Boom, the Dutch bookmaker and designer, is making an art book out of the unabridged sequence.
