Synopsis "Raptus (Penguin Poets)"
"Everywhere, a forceful, scrupulous intelligence is active---a luminous diction, a range of cadences." So has Mark Strand written of Joanna Klink, whose elegant and sensual poetry has won significant acclaim. The linked poems in her new collection search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true."In Raptus, Joanna Klink fearlessly inscribes, in consummate lyric art, a bearing of profound loss not often brought to utterance, but she has done so---musically, beautifully, in tensile language, in a vertiginous form all her own that transports us from one consciousness to another. This is a poet who knows which losses are irreparable, and also the suffering that shall not heal, the singing that lifts---washed, unwinged---and is nevertheless heard on every page. Klink is a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement." ---Carolyn Forche"Joanna Klink's new work is wrought from a kind of spiritual exactitude, Even through her numinous cortege of aching, a wild kindness keeps the poems aloft. When she writes (of poetry itself) `I held it to my throat unabashed,' you believe her. She does not flinch." ---Lucie Brock-Broido"To say that Raptus is heartbreaking is to tell only half the story. The book is, in fact, uplifting. Here is a poet abiding desire as both the sharp-beaked raptor for whom we are undone into carrion and the radiant rapture that draws us heavenward, that scatters us among the stars. Not only does Joanna Klink aspire to the firmament, she arrives."---D. A. Powell"In every generation of American poets, there seems to be one collection which, however gently, however tactfully, changes the tone and sets a new direction. John Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains was one such, and Jorie Graham's Erosion was another. I am deeply convinced that Raptus very soon will prove to be among that company. Joanna Klink has moved human relationship to a vatic, visionary place, and we are changed." ---Donald Revell
