On the surface, L. S. Klatt’s poems are airy and humorous—with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub—but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.

 Under the heat of inquiry, under the pressure of metaphor, the poems in Cloud of Ink liquefy, bend, and serpentine as they seek sometimes a new and sometimes an ancient destination. They present the reader with existential questions as they side-wind into the barbaric; the pear is figured as a “wild boar” and the octopus is “gutted,” yet primal energies cut a pathway to the mystical and the transcendent. The poetic cosmos Klatt creates is loquacious and beautiful, strange and affirmative, but never transparent. Amid “a maelstrom of inklings,” the writer—and the audience—must puzzle out the meaning of the syllabary.

L. S. Klatt teaches American literature and creative writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, Eleven Eleven,and Verse. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry.

“L. S. Klatt’s new collection creates a taxonomy of mystery, magic, surprise. Like a cloud, it floats through the reader’s mind with playful shapeliness—but like ink, it leaves a darker, and lasting, impression.”—Robert N. Casper, publisher, jubilat

" I am adrift in a burned-out canoe / without a helmsman.' If you've ever felt lik this, then L.S. Klatt's Cloud of Ink should offer you some kind of cold-in this case the right kind of cold-comfort. Klatt's poems broadcast elegiac tones and redemptive notes; their combinations underscore the conviction we know by poetry's precisions, in some places and at some times felt as hope in spite of despair."-Dara Wier, Reverse Rapture