Visiting Author - Sophie Klahr - Two Open Doors in a Field

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Saturday, May 20, 2023  4:30pm - 5:30pm

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Arts

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GET EXCITED! SOPHIE KLAHR WILL BE AT FRANCIE AND FINCH BOOKSHOP ON MAY 20TH AT 4:30 TO PRESENT HER BOOK OF POETRY TWO OPEN DOORS IN A FIELD, PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS. THIS WORK WON HER A BACKWATERS PRIZE IN POETRY HONORABLE MENTION!

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.

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.

Book Reviews:
“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