Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

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New work from an awardwinning poet

Joanna Klink has won acclaim for poetry of bracing emotional intensity. Of her most recent book, Raptus, Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.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 WeeklyJOANNA KLINK is the author of four books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, Raptus, and Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, most recently The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana.US

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