They Are Sleeping

In her graceful first collection of poetry, Joanna Klink explores the pressures of convention, distraction, self-interest, privacy -- any kind of buffer against experience that we cultivate to protect ourselves from damage. Klink's poems speak to our impulse to be free of feeling, and she tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on "self" slips -- 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.