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Days & Chances
From “a poet of lyric wonderment, angular beauty, and uncompromising vision” (Poetry Northwest), a luminous new meditation on loss and love
In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth poetry collection, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as “moments of being”: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances helps us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.
In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth poetry collection, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as “moments of being”: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances helps us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2026
About the author
Joanna Klink
13 books54 followersJoanna 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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 13, 2026
I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007). Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)
I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).
Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.
I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.
But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it!
Why do so few people know this?
_____
KLINK'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INCLUDE thanks to Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks, which got my attention because Klink's poems often reminded me, very generally, of Graham's. I may not have noticed this had I not been reading a lot of Graham recently, because there is no very close resemblance in voice or tone, but it did occur to me that both Graham's and Klink's poems tend to be situated outdoors and to render a fine-grained, multi-sensory inventory of a chosen outdoors moment.
Nothing all that surprising about this, I suppose, since it has been going on since Wordsworth (at least), but there is a particular heightening or intensity in the poetry of Graham and Klink. It's a little as though psychotropic pharmaceuticals were involved, although I imagine that Graham's and Klink just have more amplitude in their sensoria than I do. Nothing in the great blooming, buzzing confusion is lost on them.
Even in the sequence "Rothko Chapel," about an indoors space, Klink places us outdoors.
We are stone changed by light.
We brood against walls of
violet, see by feeling, moving
our eyes into the black silk
surround. We hold
still like flames. Bored through
by dusk, skeletons of dusk
watching the tides' silver shadows
blow out across the lawn.
We pass like the day through
clouds--watching cargo
cross cold water, a blurred
phosphorescence flowing beneath
ice.
I'm not sure whether we are in an actual outdoors here or an "outdoors" conjured up by Rothko's paintings, but whichever it is, we are immersed in it, and there is no clean separation between it and us. We and it make a whole--not exactly an "everything fits together" whole, not a "no loose ends" whole, but an inseparability, an evaporation of boundaries.
"Called" is a good example.
[...] the rising
scale of that bird I cannot
see, burst of burbling
gold from the tree where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by those branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I
was [...]
"Phenomenological" is the word that comes to mind. "Descriptive" won't do, because we get not just a picture, not just a scene, but the mutual near-dissolution of the perceiving subject in the perceived surroundings and of the perceived surroundings in the perceiving subject. One of my favorite Graham poems, "Emergency," does this, and Cole Swenson might be cited as an example too. I wish Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections had taken up these poets.
______
SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death.
Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.
I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:
Who was I
then but the space that had
always been around me, never
not touched, the end, was it?
of my distinction, having
worked so hard to separate
myself, to distill, for decades,
who I was, vessel, given
in in reverent surrender,
thinking always of the world
that let me stay this
long, the branch of
air I become that is the room's
air, and the meadow's.
I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.
I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).
Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.
I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.
But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it!
Why do so few people know this?
_____
KLINK'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INCLUDE thanks to Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks, which got my attention because Klink's poems often reminded me, very generally, of Graham's. I may not have noticed this had I not been reading a lot of Graham recently, because there is no very close resemblance in voice or tone, but it did occur to me that both Graham's and Klink's poems tend to be situated outdoors and to render a fine-grained, multi-sensory inventory of a chosen outdoors moment.
Nothing all that surprising about this, I suppose, since it has been going on since Wordsworth (at least), but there is a particular heightening or intensity in the poetry of Graham and Klink. It's a little as though psychotropic pharmaceuticals were involved, although I imagine that Graham's and Klink just have more amplitude in their sensoria than I do. Nothing in the great blooming, buzzing confusion is lost on them.
Even in the sequence "Rothko Chapel," about an indoors space, Klink places us outdoors.
We are stone changed by light.
We brood against walls of
violet, see by feeling, moving
our eyes into the black silk
surround. We hold
still like flames. Bored through
by dusk, skeletons of dusk
watching the tides' silver shadows
blow out across the lawn.
We pass like the day through
clouds--watching cargo
cross cold water, a blurred
phosphorescence flowing beneath
ice.
I'm not sure whether we are in an actual outdoors here or an "outdoors" conjured up by Rothko's paintings, but whichever it is, we are immersed in it, and there is no clean separation between it and us. We and it make a whole--not exactly an "everything fits together" whole, not a "no loose ends" whole, but an inseparability, an evaporation of boundaries.
"Called" is a good example.
[...] the rising
scale of that bird I cannot
see, burst of burbling
gold from the tree where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by those branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I
was [...]
"Phenomenological" is the word that comes to mind. "Descriptive" won't do, because we get not just a picture, not just a scene, but the mutual near-dissolution of the perceiving subject in the perceived surroundings and of the perceived surroundings in the perceiving subject. One of my favorite Graham poems, "Emergency," does this, and Cole Swenson might be cited as an example too. I wish Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections had taken up these poets.
______
SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death.
Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.
I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:
Who was I
then but the space that had
always been around me, never
not touched, the end, was it?
of my distinction, having
worked so hard to separate
myself, to distill, for decades,
who I was, vessel, given
in in reverent surrender,
thinking always of the world
that let me stay this
long, the branch of
air I become that is the room's
air, and the meadow's.
I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.
October 17, 2026
“Like a stupor of climbing roses, my family” ❤️
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews