Joanna Klink is an unusual poet by the standards of 2026: she has a vanishingly small public presence and doesn’t use any social media. In a 2023 interview with Holly Amos, when discussing the internet, Klink states that “we don’t need it”, and that, in spite of its benefits, “it’s also harmful”, which perhaps explains her reluctance to build an online presence.
When I first became interested in her work, around ten years ago, there were only one or two interviews with her available online: it was very difficult to get much of a sense of who Klink was, beyond what was happening in the work itself.
Personally I find this somewhat refreshing: it’s easy to get a bit cynical about the world of contemporary poetry, which seems very focused on social media presence and the personality (constructed or otherwise) of the poet behind the work. It can easily feel as if we’re all more interested in gossip or biography than the words on the page1.
I wanted to write this post to introduce Klink — a poet I’m a great fan of — to a wider audience, and share a couple of the things I find distinctive about her work.
[Interviewer]: If you could talk to a younger Joanna, say, Joanna in her mid-20s, what would you tell her?
[Klink]: To calm down? To be less of an egomaniac and to listen more. To spend more time with people, more time outdoors and on a bike, less time in your head.
Late Summer, Childhood
The initial motivation to write this post were two new poems published by Klink in issue fifty-eight of The Adroit Journal, “Late Summer, Childhood” and “Footings”. To my eye, both these poems exhibit familiar traits of Klink’s voice.
“Late Summer, Childhood” opens with the lines
August, listless. A glaze of heat on skin. The slow smear of roads below thick air. [...]
The opening of the poem with a brief phrase loosely — almost curtly — situating the reader in a moment and a mood, is typical of Klink’s work. Compare the beginning of the earlier “Aerial”:
Scissors embers misnomers Are you this loneliness of hands Do you burrow past kindness
In both poems, the opening details are at once particular and spare: scissors, embers, misnomers, August, listlessness; a mixture of concrete and abstract. For me, they give a sense of something remembered: blurry, with a few specific details picked out.
These openings feel both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’, building up a dense, material world infused with human mood and emotion; yet with lots of room for ambiguity. They both situate us but also leave us with a sense of drifting or floating in the world of the poem; at once anchored and loose.
Similarly to “Aerial”, “Late Summer, Childhood” follows its opening remarks with a series of questions:
[...] What is it in the luxuriant trees that drapes onto lawns. What in the sun rippling through a glass of ice. [...]
Once again, the details in this opening are once again both sparse or anonymous — but also rich with description (e.g. the wonderful “drapes” and “luxuriant trees”). This twofoldness is a hallmark of Klink’s technique.
It’s also interesting to consider what the questions seem to be asking. Both are directing the reader to look at something which isn’t quite present — something “in the luxuriant trees” or “in the sun” (emphasis mine). We are told that this thing “drapes onto lawns” or “rippl[es] through a glass of / ice” — in other words, whatever it is, it seems to be defined by transit, by passing-through.
Furthermore, the lack of question marks — very common in Klink — lends a kind of body to the questions — we know they are questions, yet we are not sure if the speaker actually wants an answer to these questions, nor who the questions are addressed to.
What does it mean to pose a question which doesn’t really want answering? They seem at once destined for the reader but also travel beyond us, too.
Klink seems to be pointing towards something numinous: at once out of reach, but simultaneously appreciable if a “luxuriant” attention is paid to the objects of the physical world; a glass of ice, a tree on a lawn.
The remainder of the first section of “Late Summer, Childhood”, closes out Klink’s argument:
We cloud over in plastic chairs, we rattle drinks to cool our throats. Whole seasons pass through us. A fish leaps from a still pond. What for?
What I’m particularly interested in here is the use of the first-person plural “we”. Who is this “we”? Who does it encompass, who exclude? Does it perhaps just denote the speaker herself (a kind of ‘royal we’), or is this a gesture intended to bring the reader into the poem?
As before, there is a sense that this “we” or “us” is something through which other forces transit: “Whole / seasons pass / through us.” Are “we” like the aforementioned “glass of ice”, or the “tree”, then — not in fact the subject of the poem, but an entity that the poem stages in order to talk about something which cannot otherwise be adequately rendered in direct experience?2
Klink often uses the ‘we’ in her poems as a way, it seems to me, to broaden or soften the speaker into the wider landscape of her poetry. I think she is asking us to broaden her view, look up from our phones; to zoom out or blend in.
JK: I’m always looking for some strand of emotional clarity, some precise counter-pressure to disarray. — in an interview for The Adroit Journal
Second person singular
Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: time returns to the shell. In the mirror is Sunday, in the dream we sleep, the mouth speaks true.
— Paul Celan, “Corona”, trans. Pierre Joris
In her 2000 article You. An Introduction to Paul Celan, Klink both defends Celan against the charge of hermeticism — writing poetry that is inaccessible, inherently closed-off — and also writes, significantly, “The IYou relation is the irreducible structure in Celan's poetry, the condition of possibility of anything happening at all within the poem.”3 .
In other words, Celan’s poems attempt to relate the ‘I’ of the speaker to the ‘you’ — an addressee, who may be absent, lost, or not yet arrived.
I think this is why I frequently have the sense that the speaker in Klink’s poems is using ‘you’ to talk to herself, as one would — for instance — if one wanted to calm oneself down; that what Klink most wants with her poems is to break through to herself.
Two poems which I think illustrate this quite well are “Apology”, from Klink’s second collection Circadian, and the more recent “Elegy”, from The Nightfields.
Apology
“Apology” opens with a direct address to a second person:
Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me and I believe you.
Although softly-spoken, this is a demanding opening line-and-a-half. Is it the speaker or the ‘you’ who is “disturbed”? What is it, exactly, that the speaker “believe[s]” of the you?
I think the most we can glean here, before proceeding, is that the purpose of the “you” in this poem is to present a challenge to (and perhaps interrogate) the “I”. Or, to put it in the terms of Klink’s essay on Celan, the “you” represents “something [...] broken-through-to”.
“Apology” continues by sketching the outlines of a debate:
[...] How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.
The imagery in this passage is that of absence or perhaps death: “books stacked clean on glass”, “surfaces grow[ing] so distant” and, of course, “the snow”. As before, this imagery is both specific and also filled with emptiness; transparency.
But it’s the syntax of these lines which is most curious: from the opening question-which-is-not-a-question — which almost feels broken off before it is definitively asked — to “outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving”.
On the one hand, the speaker is probing for something: she wants to know (“How could I not feel”, she asks). On the other, there seems to be some ambivalence about the prospect of knowledge: the speaker is herself incomplete; “still arriving”.
If the speaker of the poem is herself somewhat uncertain or porous, there’s a sense that this instability or doubt extends to the addressee, too.
There are two key moments in the poem which I think illustrate this. The first occurs roughly in the middle of the piece:
And if you mean me, I believe you.
The chiasmus-like structure of this end-stopped line — coming as it does after the poem’s meandering opening section — seems to gently imply that the addressee of the poem — the person being apologised-to — is not in fact another person, but the speaker herself.
For me, this takes me back to the end of the first line: “you stay trailing in me”. The poet seems to be suggesting quite strongly that the “you” being addressed is entwined in the body or voice of the speaker.
The next moment which illustrates Klink’s use of “you” occurs in the second half of the poem:
and should you fold into me—trackless, misspent, too much arranged—I might believe you but swiftly shut, lines of smoke rising through snow, [...]
Klink seems to be clearly articulating here that the ‘you’ can really become part of the ‘me’, the speaker of the poem. It is this ‘folding’ which gives rise to the possibility of belief — fully trusting in the existence of another — before this is retracted (“but swiftly shut”).
Like smoke and snow, then, the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of “Apology” will both continue on their drift as vague, nebulous presences — but not join.
The final statement of the poem seems to suggest, paradoxically, the possibility of recognition via dissolution:
In these hours when snow shuts, it may be we empty, amounting to something. How could I not wait for those few words, which we might enter.
It is when “we empty” that we could “amount[…] to something”. Rather than ‘folding’ into one another, it is language which provides a meeting place — a place “we might enter”, in spite of everything.
In Celan's poems, the real "happens" or appears when its existence is confirmed by two: "through your nearness, such things become visible." — Joanna Klink, from You. An Introduction to Paul Celan
Elegy
The more recent “Elegy”, to my eye, presents a clearer picture of the “IYou” dynamic which is nonetheless similar to the one depicted in “Apology”. In some sense, I read “Elegy” as a re-articulation of “Apology” by a poet who has matured and has gained an understanding of her subject matter.
Traditionally, an elegy has three phases:
Sorrow, despair, loss.
Reflection and remembrance.
Acceptance or consolation.
Klink’s elegy follows this structure quite cleanly, opening with a description of a collapse, thematically linked to the kinds of disasters which affect the natural world:
I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall. The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off.
The phrases here are short and declarative; definitive. The repetition of “saw” lends a forcefulness to the lines, which I think solidifies the boundary between the speaker-I and the subject-you.
The final phrase describes the “wildness” as if it’s birdlike; as in “Late Summer, Childhood”, humans are portrayed as beings possessed by other elemental, animalistic forces. The loss we suffer is out of our control.
The moment of elegaic reflection or remembrance comes at almost exactly the halfway mark, on line eight (the poem is eighteen lines long):
You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight. What power there was was over. But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling— and it fell, a few glints in the air,
In particular, the beautiful “What power / there was was over” lifts the elegiac mood to its full potential: the force has gone out of something (it’s not clear if this is due to a bereavement or injury or loss), and yet the characters in the poem must go on (“But I switched on the light…”; I wanted to see).
One aspect of Klink’s skill that I greatly admire is her ability to convey the full emotion of the poem without giving us biographical details or really relying on narrative. This makes the poem both more universal (these speakers could be any of us, they are not tied to a specific time or place), and also more devotional.
It is at this moment of emotional crisis in “Elegy” that a “we” is brought in (“and we stayed”). On the one hand, ‘we’ seems quite clearly to denote the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ brought together (“our arms braced with weight”); on the other, it’s complicated: how could there be a ‘we’ if the ‘you’ has already “left”?
One way of reading this line — similar to the moment of dissolution at the end of “Apology” — is that the possibility of communion arises when the characters let go of their egos. That is, I can see a reading of the opening “You left” as ‘the person that you had been, you with your ego’ had left, giving room for a new “we” to emerge.
Or perhaps what’s being described here is a genuine absence, and the ‘we’ is pointing towards memory — ‘what we once were, together’4.
Or perhaps there are three characters in the poem, and the “we” is gesturing towards a couple left over when a third person has “left”.
Similarly to “Apology”, the moment of consolation or acceptance in “Elegy” is brought about by the snow — another kind of falling, echoing the opening of the poem, where the falling seems clearly to be that of a human. The single long sentence in the second half of the poem, with its drifting phrases, seems to embody the movement of falling snow:
and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.
The faces “buried” in the snow evoke of course the burial that awaits all of us in death; a moment of renunciation. And the span of the snowfall comes to stand for “years”: a moment where geological time and human time are brought into close contact.
In true fidelity to the elegiac mood, the last line of “Elegy” brings about a new understanding of what has been lived through: the snow’s falling is “effortless, / as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.” We have gone through an experience and learned something about our lives.
As I imagine it, a voice is addressing a person, “you,” who stands under a night sky. (Sometimes the poems are spoken by a “we” that includes both.) And the person is stationed on the edge of the volcano crater, looking up and out at the night, or looking down at the grasslands and ground below. — Joanna Klink, in a 2020 interview for the Kenyon Review.
“After all these years, the visions continue”
In recent work — from The Nightfields on — I’ve detected a new concern in Klink’s work, around aging. The poems feel in many cases more brittle and doubting than her earlier work, as if the process of growing old is one of scattering and dissolution, rather than consolidation.
There is also more anxiety about what the meaning of a life dedicated to poetry might have been. As a way of closing out this piece, I’d like to consider what is beautifully and somewhat devastatingly put in the second section of “Late Summer, Childhood”:
[...] What is it, Joanna. After all these years, the visions continue and I can’t make out who I’ve been, and is it a fault I tell myself what I want most is to be helpful? I watch my parents work to sustain the day when their legs won’t brace them, their eyes packed with clouds.
There’s so much I could say about these lines.
Once again, there is a sense of the reader placing questions like seeds — not to be answered, per se; but instead to echo and inform the course of the poem. Questions which open us, rather than close us (by having a ready answer).
Then there is an almost distressed evocation of the poetic project — “the visions / continue” yet the speaker “can’t make / out who [she has] been”. It’s as if poetry’s promise of understanding or depth or awareness hasn’t been fulfilled5.
Finally, the speaker turns outwards again: towards her parents, working against the failure of their human bodies.
Their “eyes” being “packed with clouds” (I take this as an allusion to cataracts) is a wonderful final image of the natural world reclaiming their bodies, all the while directing the eye of the reader to the sky — the realm of birds and angels, of the immaterial soul.
It is an image that’s ambivalent in a way that’s typical of Klink: there’s no promise of redemption here — no world other than the one in which we live — but the force of the image itself, and the music of the words, really serves to stop the reader, I think, and make us look at what the poem is showing us. It makes us look up and pay attention.
“When four of my father’s physics colleagues, people I had known since childhood, were shot and killed by a physics graduate student in Iowa City in 1991, I was auditing an undergraduate poetry workshop with Heather McHugh. In the weeks that followed the shootings, she brought elegies to class. Reading elegies out loud for three hours at a time—that helped clarify for me what restoration might look like, in language. Not consolation. But being brought back to one’s senses and one’s capacity for grief.” — Joanna Klink, in a brief interview for The Adroit Journal
Joanna Klink’s new book Days & Chances will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026.
Of course, the counter to this is that social media has been wonderful for cultivating new communities around poetry and promoting voices which might be ignored by traditional means of publication.
When discussing Klink’s poems recently with a friend, I suggested that her poems are not in fact the words on the page, but rather what sits ‘behind’ the words; this is an idea similar to the one somewhat infamously expounded by Ben Lerner in The Hatred of Poetry. Namely, that one of the qualities which defines poetry is its inability to live up to the idea we have of it.
“we stayed” then being something like “you stayed in my mind”, or, “in my mind, I still see us together”.
In her interview with Holly Amos, Klink says “one of the things I love about poetry is that it, you know, it opens up a moment in time and lets you just stay there and not feel like you’re rushed on to the next thing”. I think this is a common and meaningful evocation of what poetry is good for: a heightened awareness of time and being.
Love it. Going to John Sandoe today so the timing is immaculate! I shall Klink like I have not Klinked before