Synopses & Reviews
In They Are Sleeping, Joanna Klink tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on self” is loosened and blurred--caves, coastlines, rooms in cities. As her poems lead us through these sometimes beautiful, sometimes appalling internal landscapes, characters like the Hanged Man and the Lady of Situations reappear, often locked in misunderstanding but compelling us toward a more fragile and expansive sense of self.
Review
"In Joanna Klinks poems the limits of consciousness are constantly tried by the seductive enchantments of lyricism; clarity and mystery are not only brought close to each other, often they seem indistinguishable. Everywhere, a forceful, scrupulous intelligence is active—a luminous diction, a range of cadences. Everywhere, the burden of feeling is borne with ease."--Mark Strand, former Poet Laureate of the United States
Review
"They Are Sleeping is . . . so rare for a first collection, with a moving and complex tension between its lines and sentences, an engaging kaleidoscopic sense of diction, and a form of sequence to which the reader awakens and re-awakens. . . . Joanna Klink invents a new mythology for those 'landscapes without particulars'—the unmarked natural spaces and cultural sites gone haywire—that separate what is American from what bears meaning over time."--Susan Stewart, author of The Forest
Review
"Joanna Klink is a love poet. Love, like Tarot, is a game of chance where the stakes are souls. Under the sign of the Hanged Man—Le Pendu—true-love comes to pass. Crucified upside down like Saint Paul—hero of reversal—the love-visionary turns hazard and sacrifice into finding and benefit. The presence of such poetry makes everyone—all the persons whom its beauty touches—NEW. This is the finding of an unmistakable poet—her gift."--Allen Grossman, author of The Philosopher's Window
About the Author
Joanna Klink teaches at the University of Montana at Missoula. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Verse, and Prairie Schooner.