THE NIGHTFIELDS

This is a new collection from a poet who has "made a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Gluck).

Joanna Klink has won acclaim for poetry of bracing emotional intensity. Her fifth collection begins with personal poems that deal with a specific loss (a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents); other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from disbelief at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and even a group of devotional poems.

THE NIGHTFIELDS closes with "The Night Sky", a sequence of thirty-three metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into a subterranean, open-air observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear, in a sense of grief and personal limitation, and move gradually towards a feeling of interconnectedness and limitlessness.

Readers of Paul Celan, Carrie Fountain, Robyn Schiff, Emily Skaja, and Quan Barry, among others, and fans of poetry that explores themes of solitude, liminality, aging, and friendship will love this new collection.

Joanna Klink is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including, most recently, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, which was a finalist for the Rilke Prize. She is also the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitelli Ranieri, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.