THEY ARE SLEEPING
SELECT POEMS
REVIEWS
“In Joanna Klink’s 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
“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 reawakens…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
“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
“These songs greeting the dawn are lamentations and celebrations all at once, and they epitomize the distinctive harmony that Klink has maintained in balancing extremes throughout this striking debut.”— Boston Review
“The lyric spaces of They Are Sleeping are shifting, slippery, plangent and persistent: they want to, but they just can’t sit still…Klink finds refuge in sequences, where she renders settings, characters, and concepts with an unflagging and varied music. They Are Sleeping is a moving and daringly philosophical first collection.”— Rain Taxi
“Anyone who remembers reading modernist poets such as Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot will find that Klink’s ambitious, intellective poems more than repay the work it takes to enter their world.”— Eugene Weekly
“Klink creates a lyrical sea-garden where ‘the wind clicks in the trees,’ a beautiful impressionism of slippery sounds and shifting subjects…Klink achieves resonance and music worthy of accolade.”— Verse
“[This is] beautiful writing, sensuous and troubling.”— Colorado Review