They Are Sleeping

Poems by Joanna Klink

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, former Poet Laureate of the United States

"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 re-awakens. . . . 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, author of The Forest


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Description
In They Are Sleeping, Joanna Klink tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on “self” is loosened and blurred—caves, coastlines, rooms in cities. As her poems lead us through these sometimes beautiful, sometimes appalling internal landscapes, characters like the Hanged Man and the Lady of Situations reappear, often locked in misunderstanding but compelling us toward a more fragile and expansive sense of self.
Page count: 88 pp.
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
  

Paper
List price: $16.95
978-0-8203-2275-9
12/4/2000

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Joanna Klink is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. She teaches at the University of Montana at Missoula.