Two Open Doors in a Field - (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention) by Sophie Klahr (Paperback)

About the Book

Through sonnets and a long sequence, the poems of Two Open Doors in a Field are constructed with deliberate limitations, restlessly exploring place, desire, and spirituality.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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-- (8/5/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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

"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

"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'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

"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

About the Author

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.