selected poems: 

the new yorker: [He drinks like the Faithful]

blackbird : [she sees like a memory aware of itself…

Pieces in constant stranger: after frank stanford

the cincinnati review: 2 pieces of like Nebraska

poetry london: driving through texas…

ploughshares: DRIVING THROUGH ARIZONa….

the gettysburg review: MOTEL, WYOMING + 1 more

neck: 3 SONNETS zyzzyva : 2 sonnets

MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW: 2 sonnets

the rumpus (voices on addiction feature): 5 poems

 

About the Book

The poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed through deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality. A profusion of sonnets rise from a single circumstance: Sophie Klahr’s experience of driving thousands of miles alone while listening to the radio, where unexpected landscapes make listening to the unexpected more acute. Accompanied by the radio, Klahr’s experience of land is transformed by listening, and conversely, the body of the radio is sometimes lost to the body of the land. The love story at the core of this work, Klahr’s bond with Nebraska, becomes the engine of this travelogue. However far the poems range beyond Nebraska, they are tethered to an environment of work and creation, a place of dirt beneath the nails where one can see every star and feel, acutely, the complexity of connection.

PRAISE:

“…The Poet’s attention to detail makes the forgettable sacred…” — Poetry Foundation

“The experience of reading these poems is beyond an offering to the reader; it is as if the poems seek in their reader a sense of home…. Here is one possible answer Klahr offers us for what home is: the memory of another person.” — Adedayo Agarau, LOs Angeles Review Of books

“a Restless, stirring examination of travel and Place” — publishers weekly

“This is extraordinary poetry. Noir like that early Joan Didion we loved.” - Eileen Myles

“Sophie Klahr's spare 21st century sonnets track a drift toward and away from attachment across a beautifully drawn, often desolate landscape. It's a national myth, the lonesome rider searching the vast open spaces for shelter and refuge. But now the drifter is a woman as strong as she is vulnerable, and the wide desert skies, like the land beneath them, are compromised and endangered. Two Open Doors in a Field is exhilarating and restless, as scrupulous in its attention to our little roads and highways as it is to our longings.” -- Mark Doty

“Channeling the spirit of the late Delta poet, Frank Stanford, Sophie Klahr’s most intriguing travels are along the byways of existential angst and the treacherous trails of the human heart. In “Driving Through New Mexico, Listening to the Radio,” the poet writes, ‘. . . Human shame is / so undependable; not believing / is perhaps a so much greater power / than belief.’ And in ‘Like Nebraska,’ Klahr ponders ‘His pale body smelling of flight like a familiar story,/An entire landscape curving to pull on a pair of boots.’ These are poems to ponder in flickering lamplight.” – Roundup Magazine

“When I confess that I often had to pause and catch my breath while reading Two Open Doors in a Field, I need you to know that such light-headedness was born of utter amazement and admiration. Sophie Klahr’s poems are perpetual motion machines, stunning in all the ways they blaze among landscapes of adoration and epiphany and ache. From intimate sonnets to panoramic lyric sequences, from Jurassic seas to the spectral glow of motel pools and 'pulses of song' beneath a 'dark bowl of stars,' this synaptic second collection carries us across 'deep time' and its thresholds. She writes 'We must be // quiet to hear the universe. Must be attentive, then, must be very lucky' and we are indeed blessed to lose ourselves with her in every astonishing turn, every luminous image.” -- R.A. Villanueva

“Two Open Doors in a Field is a road map for those of us needing to connect to the world around us, particularly in an era when we’ve felt so isolated from human connection. Like the Virgil of this journey, Terence, Klahr, too, finds nothing human foreign to her, and the journey welcomes both the public and the clandestine of the human condition. Rendered not only through a windshield view of what’s possible up ahead but also of a relationship in the rear-view mirror, formally nimble sonnets see the world clearly, and hold in the collection’s core the long sequence “Like Nebraska,” which, in its self-made form, offers both an elegant and an urgent simile for love. The road is long, the night wears on, but we have “a place to sleep in her hands,” and Klahr “makes a song from that” alone.” -- A. Van Jordan