new year

I am grateful to be the featured poet this month for Voices On Addiction in The Rumpus. There are 4 new poems, and one re-printed from Meet Me Here At Dawn.

here’s a song for you 

there is always a turn

 

2 of my poems in the latest issue of ZYZZVA

cipher

originally appeared in third coast. lots forthcoming this summer…

Fable

Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
found them so beautiful
as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.

 

—Janos Pilinszky (trans. Ted Hughes)

from “Like Nebraska”

 

Thanks to sweet and wonderful D.A.Powell for soliciting this poem for Nomadic Ground, who puts poems in their bags of coffee. You can read the other poems of this quarter and buy coffee here. It means so much to me that these poems from “Like Nebraska” are being embraced so mightily by the world. Alaska Quarterly Review is about to take quite a few, maybe over 10 pieces. “Like Nebraska” is pretty much all I wrote for the past few years. I feel like the work is paying off. The work is paying off.

desire as desire: book reviews

“Meet Me Here at Dawn is a book of scrutiny and of elegy. Klahr moves with grace through topics of infidelity, age, pregnancy, and loss—but it is an uncommon grace of grim determination….In a time when language itself is under increased attack, when telling the truth is jarring and unexpected, this is the poetry we need.” – Colorado Review

“Not since Anne Sexton’s Love Poems have I read a book that so unflinchingly captures both the intense passion and the loneliness of an affair…..Klahr sheds light on powerlessness, on an often epic struggle against desire, one that—even with its suggestions of animalism—is supremely human.” – words + sweet photo by Fork & Page

excerpt from “Like Nebraska” in Blackbird

appears in Blackbird –  bucket list publication

 

TEEN SEQUINS 2017

Did you catch this year’s TEEN SEQUINS feature? It was brilliant.

start here, &  read all the poems.

here’s a glimpse: 

forthcoming

this year has been full of such grace and heartache and unexpectedness so far.

writing to you from a field in Nebraska, full of crickets and wind.

a beautiful & humbling & succinct review of MEET ME HERE AT DAWN has just appeared in Colorado Review. Immensely grateful to be read so well. 

In the coming months, I’ll have work in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, Blackbird, and AGNI. “You’re really blowing up,” said to me yesterday, by way of congratulations, for The New Yorker acceptance. The truth is, I’m hunkering down. I let the poems live on their own for awhile. For a long while. These days, I don’t submit any work that’s under two years old — I revise and revise and revise. I trust my gut. I follow the example I’ve found in Eduardo C. Corral, who seems to hold his poems close for a long time. I don’t overestimate my first thought, my first spark of love for a poem — there is no rush. I believe in Rilke’s suggestion that everything is gestation, then birthing. Everyone has their own way. But I know how changeable I am. Perhaps my writing is the one thing I am really, in some deep essential way, willing and able to let go of.

 

happy september. i hope the fall finds you well.