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