Two Open Doors in a Field
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The exploratory second collection from Klahr (Meet Me Here at Dawn) is a road poem—what the poet calls "collaged listening"—derived from voice recordings she took while driving nearly 15,000 miles back and forth between Nebraska and California over three years. Picking up signals from the radio, the landscape, and brain drift (a section of notes credits influences including Krista Tippet and Frank Stanford), these mostly free-verse sonnets consider borderless space: "Am I writing/ about the land/ or the shape/ the eye makes of the land?" ("Coda: The Hole I Dug"). In the long sequence "Like Nebraska," each section begins with a broken simile: "He draws like a lighthouse/ Holds itself," "He wanders like a record/ skips," and "He digs like a grasshopper sings—/ to recall something." Passing through harvest and blight, the driver recalls past encounters, including healing stays at a place called the Art Farm. "Pass with Care," the linked free-verse sonnet sequence that ends the book, swells with sadness and hope: "I'd like a passenger/ Perhaps you have become my passenger/ by reading my worn car door's flung open." The result is a arestless, stirring examination of travel and place. (Mar.)
