A New Yorker Best Book of 2026

From “a poet of lyric wonderment, angular beauty, and uncompromising vision” (Poetry Northwest), a luminous meditation on loss and love

In Joanna Klink’s dreamlike sixth book, she turns her gaze to ordinary days and asks, What is the measure of a life? How should we weigh time, luck, love? Against the extreme terrain of Texas—with its soaring temperatures, ice storms, and flash floods—she tries to make sense of the loss of natural spaces, her father going blind, falling in love mid-life. Each of her poems embodies what Virginia Woolf described as “moments of being”: moments of awareness and intense feeling in which we become conscious of our connection to the world around us. Flickering between personal and ecological time, Klink’s poems deepen those connections even as the landscapes and relationships around her become less recognizable. Days & Chances lets us see the depths in everyday moments—and chances to live more fully.