Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s second poetry collection has the condensed intensity of light from old stars. Like a slow, multifoliate explosion, her metaphors track the luminous traces left by the mind as it flows into and away from the life of the body. She is a poet’s poet: her images are emblematic of the inner and outer worlds that both shadow and illuminate everyday life.

Lost
thoughts, soot-lined, silver-lined
concatenations
incense of coal, cumulonimbus…
pennies and ponies on the track
heads or tails, a chance
the sleeper
lugged backwards through France,
honey-moon, lune de miel
suite, sigh, tunnel of
tickets and black gates, fate line rising from the luna mount
mind the gap a porter calls
and we cross, linked elbow to elbow
ghost cars sparking the synaptic tracks..

–from “Trains”

Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s universe is as elusive as the quantum physicist’s, where particles flash in and out of existence. Yet the shimmering quality of these poems is hooked to the earth by nouns of astonishment: “Belts, boots, spurs, stars” “sepals, stamens, catkins, matchsticks.” There is nothing ordinary about the trajectory of human existence, as these poems prove time and again.