Two Open Doors in a Field

"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