SOPHIE KLAHR

MEET ME HERE AT DAWN

AVAILABLE at YesYes Books, Small Press Distribution and Amazon

ABOUT THE BOOK: Chronicling addiction, loss, and the fabric of an extra-marital affair, the poems of Meet Me Here At Dawn embody a threshold before an inevitable crossing. Lyric narratives caught in an undertow, Meet Me Here At Dawn careens from hunger to hunger, where eroticism is tinged with elegy, and gratitude knit with doubt.

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PRAISE : "As this marvelous debut blurs the boundary between taboo and convention, secrecy & 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 & intimacy. The results are mature & unflinching. Meet Me Here At Dawn is bittersweet, sensual, & brilliant." — Terrance Hayes

"Sophie Klahr moves through the chambers of the mind & 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 & disclosive. This is poetry of immense vulnerability & fierce mettle; determined, convincing & heroically alive with courage of every kind." — D.A. Powell

REVIEWS: "Meet Me Here at Dawn is a book of scrutiny and of elegy. Klahr moves with grace through topics of infidelity, age, pregnancy, and loss—but it is an uncommon grace of grim determination....In a time when language itself is under increased attack, when telling the truth is jarring and unexpected, this is the poetry we need." - Colorado Review

"Not since Anne Sexton’s Love Poems have I read a book that so unflinchingly captures both the intense passion and the loneliness of an affair.....Klahr sheds light on powerlessness, on an often epic struggle against desire, one that—even with its suggestions of animalism—is supremely human." - Fork & Page

"Klahr's verse is alternatively lush and fiery.....incompleteness and space is something [she] takes advantage of..." - AGNI

"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

"Klahr’s line expands and contracts from poem to poem a song hummed into different jars then unscrewed" - The Bind

INTERVIEWS | REVIEWS | ETC

INTERVIEWS

full stop

american microreviews & interviews

littsburgh

friday live! on NET Nebraska (PBS/NPR)

REVIEWS & FEATURES ON MEET ME HERE AT DAWN

state lines: featured in the San Francisco Chronicle

bustle: Meet Me Here At Dawn featured with Hearth & Hammer

ETCETERA:

southern indiana review: meditation on “motel, oregon”

NECK : recording of ‘parked, nebraska’

cincinnati review: contributor’s feature

fives @ platypus press

ploughshares author's note

PANK: ask the author

prosody, 91.3 WYEP (pittsburgh) reading / interview, 2011

OTHER WRITING by me:

reviews:

quarterly west: to those who were our first gods by nickole brown (forthcoming)

the southeast review: reconnaissance by carl phillips

gulf coast: slow lightning by eduardo c. corral

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

___________ VERSUS RECOVERY

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 )