Excerpts From A Secret Prophecy

Praise for Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy “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 Glück, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award citation   “Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy is a paradoxical wonder: its lean exterior cloaks an expansive interior; its rich solemnity is couched in syntactical and imagistic intensity; its perceptiveness is simultaneously elemental and sublime.  Joanna Klink has given us Rilkean elegies haunted by 'the love you feel for what you lost.'  Her poems illuminate the membrane between loneliness and solitude."—Terrance Hayes   “A passionate but controlled lyric meditation on time, intimacy, memory, and the increasingly imperiled natural world. . .American poetry sorely needs poets willing to address such large topics in a mode like this.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Raptus:

"What happens when a relationship fails? Klink gets into the nooks and crannies of that question in her third collection. . .As it cycles through need and loss, this book illuminates just how inextricable experiences can be from the people with whom they are shared."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In Raptus, Joanna Klink fearlessly inscribes, in consummate lyric art, a bearing of profound loss not often brought to utterance, but she has done so--musically, beautifully, in tensile language, in a vertiginous form all her own that transports us from one consciousness to another. This is a poet who knows which losses are irreparable, and also the suffering that shall not heal, the singing that lifts--washed, unwinged--and is nevertheless heard on every page. Klink is a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement."--Carolyn Forché

"Joanna Klink's new work is wrought from a kind of spiritual exactitude. Even through her numinous cortège of aching, a wild kindness keeps the poems aloft. When she writes (of poetry itself) 'I held it to my throat unabashed,' you believe her. She does not flinch."--Lucie Brock-Broido

"To say that Raptus is heart-breaking is to tell only half the story. The book is, in fact, uplifting. Here is a poet abiding desire as both the sharp-beaked raptor for whom we are undone into carrion and the radiant rapture that draws us heavenward, that scatters us among the stars. Not only does Joanna Klink aspire to the firmament, she arrives."--D.A. Powell

"In every generation of American poets, there seems to be one collection which, however gently, however tactfully, changes the tone and sets a new direction. John Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains was one such, and Jorie Graham's Erosion was another. I am deeply convinced that Raptus very soon will prove to be among that company. Joanna Klink has moved human relationship to a vatic, visionary place, and we are changed."--Donald Revell