Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in tweets, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters Press, March 2023) by Sophie Klahr.
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.
Reviews:
“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.” – Adedayo Agarau, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The reader travels along in a series of sonnets, a choice of form that perfectly evokes the sense of contained movement that long-distance driving creates.” – Lorna Knowles Blake, The Hudson Review
“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.” – Larry D. Thomas, Roundup Magazine
“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 . . . The result is a restless, stirring examination of travel and place.” – Publishers Weekly
“Klahr lets the reader feel the energy of co-creating these poems. In the front seat, the steering wheel is near enough to feel as if you’re part of the driver’s decisions, though you haven’t moved a muscle.” – Sylee Gore, The Poetry Foundation
Media Mentions:
Interview in Ode and Psyche Podcast
Excerpt in Littsburgh
Excerpt on our Behind the Book blog
UNP blog 