Daniel Khalastchi and Joanna Klink in conversation

The Story of Your Obstinate Survival

Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi’s exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all.

Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the author of three previous books of poetry—Manoleria, Tradition, and American Parables—and lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing.

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The Nightfields

Joanna Klink’s fifth book, The Nightfields, begins with poems of personal loss—a tree uprooted by a windstorm, a friendship ended after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, bewilderment at the accumulation of losses, and the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The second section of the book is one long poem, written on New Year’s Day, just after the 2016 Presidential Election. The third is a sequence of poems about the night sky.

These thirty-one poems are inspired by the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that artist James Turrell has transformed into an open-air observatory for the perception of time. The poems speak to someone standing on the bowl of the volcano crater, under a dome of night, and widen toward world-loss—climate change, human migration, everything we take from other lives. “Night Sky” unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in fear and vanity and move gradually towards the possibility of interconnectedness, infinitude, and peace.

Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields (Penguin 2020). She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

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