Jeffery Klaehn


Website http://

Why do you write?

I often write about how presence can captivate, shift emotional landscapes, and quietly transform.

I tend to write in a lyrical, prose-poetic style that favours mood over structure, feeling over form. Recurring themes—desire as devotion, surrender, reverence, emotional transformation, and grace—echo through my work like emotional refrains. My influences come from everywhere: music, memory, literature, cinema, theory, late-night thoughts, and the kinds of conversations you can’t forget. I’m especially interested in how popular culture and media shape our emotional vocabularies—how they give language to what we feel.

Poetry, for me, is a way of holding what resists explanation. It’s about feeling profoundly alive—and sometimes undone—in the presence of another.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Growing up: Hemingway, Carver, Scott Fizgerald, Neruda, Jack London
More recently: David Sedaris, Hiroya Oku, Haruki Murakami, Tsutomu Nihei, Eva Illouz
TV: Doctor Who
Currently listening to: Amelie Lens; Eli & Fur; RÜFÜS DU SOL; Emilíana Torrini; Desire; Nick Cave; Cat Power; Jessie Ware; Purple Disco Machine; Sara Landry