Days & Chances

⚖The case for it

Publishers Weekly, 10 September 2026, said the book “applies a fluid and delicate touch to the imminent loss of the poet's father,” and quoted: “Is this/ what it means to grow old, to watch/ a bird in March and track, from memory,/ rocks and gulls, heat from the sea, mint/ in a garden I would have liked to grow.” PW closed on “This gorgeously textured volume is one of Klink's finest yet.” L. Lois at Compulsive Reader, a small online site, wrote on 25 July that the book “explores the agonies of grief, even as the poet explains the calm comfort of recently-found love,” and called it “a daughter's tribute to her father.” It quoted: “After a year of unrelenting deaths, / it is clearer now: how close we are / at any moment to ending, to grief.” Louise Glück, on Klink's work generally: “The extraordinary beauty of [Klink's] poems, from the beginning, has resulted from a constantly refined attention to the ordinary and the daily.” Cyrus Cassells, blurbing this book rather than her career: “Days & Chances is a consistently exquisite book by an entrancing and masterly poet.” That is the entire record as of 12 September, three days before publication.

— Publishers Weekly review of Days & Chances, 10 September 2026 (no star shown on PW's own page); L. Lois, Compulsive Reader, 25 July 2026; Louise Glück blurb on Klink's work generally and Cyrus Cassells blurb on this book, both as reprinted on the Penguin Random House page for the book; verified 2026-09-12

✕The case against

L. Lois at Compulsive Reader, 25 July 2026, named the risk: “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.” The reviewer waved it through (“if there is a tendency towards sentimentalism, the reader quickly forgives”), which is a lower bar than a permanent seat on a shelf of one thousand. The record is thin: one trade review from Publishers Weekly, unstarred on PW's own page whatever the publisher's site claims, and one review on a small site. Literary Hub's September column listed the title without discussing it. The Louise Glück and Terrance Hayes blurbs praise Klink's earlier work and are reprinted under a new title. PW's “one of Klink's finest yet” compares the book with her own five earlier collections, a different test from a seat among one thousand books by anyone. Ninety-six pages on one father's decline and one midlife love would take a seat on a shelf of one thousand from a novel or a history five times the length.

— L. Lois, Compulsive Reader, 25 July 2026 (reservations quoted verbatim); Publishers Weekly, 10 September 2026 (unstarred on PW's page; star claimed only on the publisher's site); Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub, 1 September 2026 (title listed without coverage); Louise Glück and Terrance Hayes blurbs as reprinted on the Penguin Random House page, both about Klink's earlier work; verified 2026-09-12

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