Two Open Doors in a Field

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Two Open Doors in a Field

Sophie Klahr 

The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention Series

92 pages
1 chart

Paperback

March 2023

978-1-4962-3237-3

$17.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)

(Requires Adobe Digital Editions)

March 2023

978-1-4962-3484-1

$17.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)

(Requires Adobe Digital Editions)

March 2023

978-1-4962-3483-4

$17.95 Add to Cart
about author bio praise table of contents media awards

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 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.

Author Bio

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.

Praise

"Sophie Klahr's second collection is so confidently crafted that the momentum of her poems carries the reader."—Sylee Gore, poetryfoundation.org

“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

Table of Contents

Driving Through Nebraska, Listening to the Radio 
Parked, Nebraska                      
~
Motel, Wyoming 
Driving Through Utah, Listening to the Radio 
Listening to the Radio, Driving Through Nevada Again 
Driving Through Idaho, Listening to the Radio 
Motel, Oregon 
Driving Through Oregon, Listening to the Radio 
Parked, California
Driving Through Nevada, Listening to the Radio
Driving Through Arizona, Listening to the Radio
Driving Through New Mexico, Listening to the Radio  
Driving Through Colorado, Listening to the Radio 
Driving Through Colorado Again, Listening to the Radio
Driving Through Colorado, Listening to the Radio, Thinking of My Father Again 
Driving Through Wyoming, Listening to the Radio  
Dust Storm  
Like Nebraska  
Coda: The Hole I Dug  
~
Driving Through California, Listening to the Radio 
Listening to the Radio, Driving Through Arizona Again 
Motel, Arizona  
Parked, Utah 
Listening to the Radio, Driving Through New Mexico Again 
Parked, Texas 
Driving Through Texas, Listening to the Radio  
Driving Through Oklahoma, Listening to the Radio  
Driving Through Kansas, Listening to the Radio  
Harvest  
~
Pass With Care  

General Note on Creation
Acknowledgments
Gratitudes
 

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