Two Open Doors in a Field by Sophie Klahr

Two Open Doors in a Field by Sophie Klahr

Long List for 2023 Julie Suk Award The poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed through deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality. A profusion of sonnets rises 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.

"A restless, stirring examination of travel and place"—Publishers Weekly
"Sophie Klahr's second collection is so confidently crafted that the momentum of her poems carries the reader."—Sylee Gore, poetryfoundation.org
"Over the course of Two Open Doors in a Field, the field and the doors of the title become the body's, and as the speaker's memories are embodied in language, the road trip between geographical states becomes a journey through deeply felt states of consciousness and selfhood."—Adedayo Agarau, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sophie Klahr's second collection of poems Two Open Doors in a Field takes the reader along on a road trip, that simple and enduring fantasy—the lonesome traveler seeking something—refuge, shelter, escape."—Hudson Review
“Sophie Klahr’s spare twenty-first-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
“Sophie Klahr’s poems are perpetual motion machines, stunning in all the ways they blaze through 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.”—R. A. Villanueva
“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. . . . The road is long, the night wears on, but we have ‘a place to sleep in her hands.’”—A. Van Jordan

Sophie Klahr is a poet, teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and elsewhere. Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here at Dawn.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781496232373
ISBN 10	1496232372
Title	Two Open Doors in a Field
Author	Sophie Klahr
Series	The Backwaters Prize In Poetry Honorable Mention
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Nebraska Press
Year published	2023-03-01
Number of pages	92
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable