SOPHIE KLAHR

POETRY

NEW & SELECTED: four way review

american poetry review

boaat

harvard review online

tupelo quarterly ( 1 ) ( 2 )

FORTHCOMING: + blackbird + ploughshares + agni + zyzzyva

ALSO, A SAMPLE:

public pool the journal mid-american review

ploughshares the rumpus (1) (2) (3) sycamore review

linebreak anti- california journal of poetics

revolver [pank] ampersand review

b o d y 1110 southern humanities review (1) (2)

ninth letter chautauqua washington square review

MEET ME HERE AT DAWN

AVAILABLE NOW from YesYes Books and Small Press Distribution.

PRAISE : "As this marvelous debut blurs the boundary between taboo and convention, secrecy and privacy, I kept thinking of Edward Hopper’s 1959 painting Excursion Into Philosophy, the way the lovers there impart a mix of longing and regret. Like Hopper, Sophie Klahr troubles the line between isolation and intimacy. The results are mature and unflinching. Meet Me Here At Dawn is bittersweet, sensual, and brilliant." — Terrance Hayes

"Sophie Klahr moves through the chambers of the mind and heart like an expert escape artist, keys hidden in the body's coverts are revealed in a 'rush of knowing,' the body's 'first breaking and entering' that feels both clandestine and disclosive. This is poetry of immense vulnerability and fierce mettle; determined, convincing and heroically alive with courage of every kind." —D.A. Powell

"Meet Me Here at Dawn is unlike anything I have ever come across before. It is a blaze, a song sung at full decibel. And yet, astonishingly athletic, her poems hold back, keeping perfect balance. This a wondrous collection, an important and necessary book." — Cynthia Cruz

ABOUT THE BOOK: "What is beautiful alters, has undertow," writes Linda Gregg, in "Whole And Without Blessing." Meet Me Here At Dawn is a book careening from hunger to hunger, lyric narratives living in the undertow, where eroticism is tinged with elegy, and gratitude knit with doubt. The poems are missives sent back from a threshold, chronicling disease, the pains of family, and running through it all, the fabric of an extra-marital affair. Meet Me Here At Dawn is the act of standing at the threshold, before the inevitable crossing.

REVIEWS: "The collection presents an earnest, emotional, and visceral exploration of the nature of and circumstances surrounding the nebulous idea of womanhood. The tactile facet of this exploration is felt in almost every poem. Hypocritical stigmas and double standards are left to wither in the light. Repression and oppression are left to crack under their own insensible weight. Everything is given a level playing field and treated with curiosity. The sucking of a cock and the tonguing of an anus are regarded alongside sliced oranges and flowering fields. You can feel everything as you read." - Angel City Review

ESSAYS | INTERVIEWS | MEDIA

THE LATEST:

interviewed by vi khi nao for american microreviews & interviews

ARCHIVAL EVIDENCE

media:

reading & interview on prosody, 91.3 WYEP

reading for the volta: medium

whatnot:

author's note: ploughshares blog

ask the author: PANK blog

person person: interview at modern romance

essays:

the rumpus: the last poem I loved: "locking yourself out then trying to get back in" by raymond carver

the rumpus: the last poem i loved: "bolt from the blue" by gregory orr

gulf coast editor's blog: 1. speaking out

2. when we were very young

3. the passing word

reviews:

the southeast review: reconnaissance by carl phillips

gulf coast: slow lightning by eduardo c. corral

___________ VERSUS RECOVERY

CHAPBOOK

A single poem in six sections, _____ Versus Recovery chronicles a woman's committal to a psychiatric ward and subsequent spiraling of memory, as she struggles to break with the world of addiction and grasp rehabilitation. Released from Pilot Books in 2007, this chapbook was handmade in a limited edition of 200, with design, typesetting and assembly by Betsy Wheeler.

excerpt:

Shaped like a brain shaped like a moth

world crashing in heat. pregnant

girl sits dumb in a dirty red

leather armchair on a caving porch

upstairs, someone's begging for it

a pregnant dumb world

upstairs, they say she's begging for it

a dirty red heat

upstairs, nobody's crashing. a listening,

a caving in

( a brain a moth )