Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

by Joanna Klink

New work from an awardwinning poet

Joanna Klink has won acclaim for poetry of bracing emotional intensity. Of her most recent book, Raptus , Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2015

About the author

Joanna Klink is an American poet. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and for many years taught in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana. Her new book, THE NIGHTFIELDS, was published July 7, 2020 by Penguin Books.

Reviews

[Helen McClory · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of poetry book you finish reading and start right back reading again, and in between each poem read have to take a long breath out, since you've been holding it, without realising. Grief and loneliness and desire for connection and the natural world and a gothic misty wintery atmosphere pervade.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A complex, gratifying, and thoughtful reflection on what it means to be lonely and isolated. Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, in every sense, was a book that came to me at the perfect time. Reading this during quarantine was almost a sacred experience. I read the entirety of this collection aloud to myself so that I could feel the grace of Klink’s language. And, as soon as I finished, I turned right back to the beginning and started again. Despite reading it twice, I still feel as though there are so many secrets in these poems left to uncover and I cannot wait to pick this up again.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking unreal, almost infuriatingly gorgeous and gutting.

[Sashankh Kale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. A brilliant collection of thought-provoking poems. Nothin like I've ever read before.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Place an X over who you were/ it doesn't help Shut your eyes there are/ abrasions beneath the eyelids Coming to understand/the ones you most love will die out here/ I can feel the weight of the sky the evening/turning black its arid grasses". Maybe all poetry is, in some way, about death and loss, but it's a rare book that addresses these topics with the elegance of "Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy". A powerful collection - I know I will have to re-read it sometime.

[Carla Sofia Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a while to finish because I had to keep reading and rereading to fully grasp the complex landscapes in these poems. Gosh, was it worth it. Elegiac and tender, full of deep feeling without sentimentality, this book is a master class on how to craft an intricate and tight-knit collection. Klink says so much within silences! I'll be returning to many of these poems often.

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding group of poems. They read well, and many have a narrative tone.

She seems much more oriented towards describing human interactions, and less about describing nature as in her earlier collection. Many of these poems deal with death, but beyond that I think her voice develops a theme of loneliness, of seeing people from a distance and wanting to know them up close. At times she seems like a guide who is showing us all of these people and places.

Another unique quality in her poems, shared with the earlier collection Raptus, is that they read like near-sestinas. The meaning she delivers is caught up in a self referential matrix of a few carefully chosen words. She does it so effortlessly. But the downside is that it adds a layer of ambiguity (since we don't know precisely what these words mean) to almost all of her poems. Klink's worst poems just seem to glide by, internally consistent and balanced like a sestina but difficult to relate to the real world. But her best poems, such as the three poems titled "The Graves", yoke these words to a clear human situation, and are therefore less ambiguous.

[daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

nightly i opened and closed, magnetic with hope

[r. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Place an X over who you were
it doesn’t help
Shut your eyes there are
abrasions beneath the eyelids
Coming to understand
the ones you most love will die
out here
I can feel the weight of the sky
the evening
turning black its arid grasses
You changed who I was
around you I felt
the need for pattern a physical need
to bring the hard light of the stars
inside
it never worked
Under this moon
the mountains ripple in moth-thinness
they would be crushed if you touched them
and the old oaks bracing the street
the theater
whose placard is half-stitched by frost
are nerve-endings
where the sting of being-alive
can’t stay captured

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the Sealey Challenge.

This was probably my favorite book that I discovered in August. I think its spare use of complicated language, relatively no symbolism, and setting hit me. I can be persnickety about messagey poems, but for some reason some of these very simple questions about what it means to suffer and carry on got me and made me cry. I had to slow down my reading to savor the images. I'm excited to find other Klink books now and to recommend her to my writer friends.

[Nadine Nabass · Rating 4 out of 5]

“So much yours I hardly saw what was
happening to me Give yourself like that
and you are sure to lose something”

I found Joanna Klink after reading Circadian, and still she continues to find language for the indescribable lonely feelings of being alive.

[Minnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though some of the poems about climate change were bit heavy handed, I enjoyed her voice reflected through the lines in a nature-forward, woodland fairy fashion. The genuine and tenuous connections between humans were also brought out astutely by the poet.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her language: quills. The sharpest choices.

[Hannah Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greatest poet of our time.

[Sarah Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book a couple years ago, and remember thinking at the time that this was the work of a brilliant mind, but not for me. I just finished re-reading it, and I feel much the same way, but I still deeply admire and respect the urgency of purpose behind the book. I reread it because despite not liking the abstractness of many of the poems and the lack of a grounding narrative—I’m pretty much the opposite of Joanna in every way in my stylistic choices as a writer—I know I have something important to learn from her choices. I know that I can grow, and I’m looking to her for ways to grow. For example, some of her phrases are hauntingly evocative—like “ropes for arms.” I wish I wrote that. I also want to strive to be less tethered to narrative, like Joanna—to be at home with the uncertainty that looms everywhere in her book. For all of that, this is worth a read and reread.

[Alicia]

DNF at 43%. I may return to this at a later time, not entirely repugnant to this book by any means the way the majority of my DNF's are to me because the author did have a somewhat haunting voice...but i read poetry to feel blown away every page, injected with punches of powerful emotion and lyrical beauty, not weeding through molasses just to crawl through each page. I think I need to be in a particular mind-set for this book, which i hope isn't the case with this authors other works because I have been looking forward to reading Joanna Klink for a while and don't want this to be sign of things to come

[Amara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what 3/4 of these poems were trying to say. Can you have run-ons in poetry? Some say no. I say, yes. If your sentence is two pages long and I can't even remember how it started? Yeah, poetry can have run-ons.

These high ratings baffle me. I assume the pretentious readers who enjoyed this are just far more brilliant than I. The author is award-winning?

[Claudia Christensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

BIG statement, but this might have my favorite opening poem of any collection. I read it, reread it, and sat perplexed, wondering how anything could follow such a perfect poem. that being said, the rest of the best was just as incredible. stunningggg work!