Reviewed by L Lois
Days & Chances
by Joanna Klink
Penguin Books
Sept 2026, Paperback, 70 pages, ISBN: 9780143138570
Wake up, this is the year — are you paying attention? Johanna Klink’s pattern is to release a new book of poems after five-year lapses. This year’s epistle, Days & Chances, explores the agonies of grief, even as the poet explains the calm comfort of recently-found love. The collection is a daughter’s tribute to her father — an arc that starts and ends with the complexity of sorrow, as it radiates through the poet’s prism of years.
…Someone says, That / is where I used to / walk. I don’t know how. (“Footings”, 28)
During the days laid bare by death, the chance of rain is likely. It pitter-patters through the collection. Sometimes the rain is iced, often it is comforting. It is a backdrop; it is the musical score behind the slow-moving drama and the questions that linger. When blindness strikes, after a beloved has already survived so much, Klink’s poems veer close to the white-flag self-pity of prolonged suffering. Certainly, there are days. Days with rain. But, is it really chance — or is it life’s inevitable cycle refusing to be pegged?
…Other days I tried to hear it, / a deeper peace hitched to wind— / bees above the fence (“The Lamps”, 67)
A collection of poems ought not be assumed autobiographical. It’s a junior mistake to think the poet’s narrator is masking self-disclosure. But, in this collection, the connection seems unavoidable. This is a tribute, but also a lament. It is intensely personal. Even new love, when it surprises with the ever-present chance of happiness, retreats to the background quickly. The loss is too fresh, too recent, too raw. There’s a sobering undertext, for this grief admits it has compassion close at-hand. Klink is a lucky one — she has stability to cling to, when the chop rises. And she has her art. Nonetheless, it is possible to drown.
After a year of unrelenting deaths, / it is clearer now: how close we are / at any moment to ending, to grief. We are not / exceptional. But your presence to my life, / the shimmer in your eyes and sweet / idleness of days…(“On Getting Married”, 36)
This book is a collection of seriousness, not depression. It addresses loss, longing, regret, even ambivalence and hopelessness, then walks in nature, finding solace in the things that go on. The rain, yes. But also, the beauty of fresh snow. And, always, the birds. If there is a tendency towards sentimentalism, the reader quickly forgives, recognizing the intensity of feelings we all tend to tearfully protect.
…The griefs I’ve known / lit quietly inside me, so much tried for / then abandoned. Vanishing, / I eavesdrop on the squawking magpies (“Eavesdropping”, 32)
At the book’s half-way point, the poet turns slightly. Large language models are introduced, if only briefly. It could be the death of nature itself, through implied eco-alteration — but language rises, wielding the knife that cuts off the choking. Like Jorie Graham’s To 2040, there is an immediacy to the shift. There’s a cri de coeur, present even during the simple sweetness of losing oneself in nature’s balm, a call-back to gentle earth-warnings from Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver. Maybe the poet was rooting around for where to cast blame and technology’s reckless pace fit her thinking. Regardless, LLMs or not, the keening must continue; in the end, keening just might be the meaning to the days, the chant that infills chance’s fickle actions.
Klink’s writing is carefully measured, with a cadence that pulls the reader forward persistently. Strong emotions contain just enough curiosity to ground the flow. Her line breaks feel so natural, it’s tempting to forget they once had to be carefully determined. This morning, the sun still rose, but it will set tonight with more poignancy. The rain, like the stages of grief, pounds, weeps, self-sooths, and endures. In the end, Days & Chances hints broadly at a sense of let-down — sorrow unadorned and honest, poetry that quietly understands our deepest disappointments and fears.
Oh floating world that overlays / isolation…(“Line from Memory”, 22)
…When I trail a wrist / through the air the air feels branched / and altered…(“Porch Swing”, 6)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, while prioritizing writing, publication, and arts-related volunteerism. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Washington Square Review, Hanging Loose Magazine, Chiron Review, Poetry Breakfast, among other publications. L. Lois is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets, is part of the editorial team at Quibble Lit, and freelances as a business feature writer and poetry workshop leader. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.