Two Open Doors in a Field (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention) - Softcover

Klahr, Sophie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496232372 ISBN 13: 9781496232373

Publisher: The Backwaters Press, 2023

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.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Driving Through Nebraska, Listening to the Radio

Dawn on 101.5, The Fever:
Sometimes you’re gonna have to lose, it sings.
Mice behind the lath, swallows in the eaves;
a rush of bergamot, wild sage drying
on the sill, boots already wet from dew.
The branches of a huge burn pile lift like
still-submerged
coral. That old dream again:
the dream again of the house that isn’t.
Why don’t you admit, you said, that all roads
lead to Nebraska. In the time we spent
together, somewhere, a few languages
died. When you said It will always be un-even
between us, I heard a new word
for a field impossible to measure

Parked, Nebraska

you explained something to me about fire
which I knew I would quickly forget. love
is so short, forgetting is so long. this
had been something I needed, what you said
about the fire. for weeks we touched only
in the dark, pulsed like sea anemones.
every morning, you designed a new way
to leave. soon we lost an hour of daylight;
a turn signal of mine had broken—left
side, back. I wanted to believe I could
fix it myself. winter had rolled onto
the acreage like someone turning in
bed, their palm smoothing to fit a lover’s
rib. when it snows, a car can disappear.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Backwaters Press
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 1496232372
• ISBN 13: 9781496232373
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 92