’tis the Season!

For 50% off Two Open Doors in a Field, use code 6HLW23 at purchase / checkout with The University of Nebraska. For 30% off There Is Only One Ghost in the World, use code HOLIDAY2023 (which also gets you free shipping) at purchase / checkout with the University of Alabama Press! 

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, I’m reading at the Malibu Public Library on December 16th, Saturday morning at 11 AM, which I think is a nice time for a reading. There is an open mic after, and I’ll have some books for purchase. 

If you’re thinking of starting the new year by diving into the literary journal world, you might want to come to my seminar Diving into the Muck: How to Submit Poetry, Not Become Defeated!  The publishing process can feel daunting (to put it mildly) but in this seminar, we’ll look at both the nitty gritty and the big picture: where to submit, how to put together a submission packet (including the do’s and don’ts of cover letters), how to navigate editorial suggestions, acceptances, and, of course, those inevitable rejections! This 1.5 hour seminar on publishing in literary journals will help you to kickstart and/or streamline your personal submission habits, and perhaps most importantly, help foster a stress-free and healthy outlook on publishing. Open to ages 15+. Sunday, Jan 7th 10 am – 11:30 am PST

Read my interview on There Is Only One Ghost in the World here at Booktrib ! You can also check out the first review of There is Only One Ghost in the World here, and order your copy of There Is Only One Ghost in the World today!

Get your copy now of the 2022 winner of Fiction Collective 2’s Ronald Sukenick Contest for Innovative Fiction! Available via Bookshop and many fine local bookstores, as well as Kindle via Amazon!

New Online Class starts in October!

REBELLION DOGS: POETRY ON ADDICTION AND RECOVERY (FOR 12 STEP PROGRAM MEMBERS): REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

“…so it is that we first see humility as a necessity….rebellion dogs our every step at first.” (12 x 12, Step 7) This 6 week poetry course is designed for anyone who identifies as a practicing member of a 12 Step program. No experience with poetry required! “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion, and perhaps no community of people is more acutely aware of this than those in the communities of 12 Step recovery. In the first 4 weeks, we will read poems that address the heartbreak, hope, and complexity of addiction and the recovery process, and use those works as generative prompts. After a two week break, we will gather for another 2 weeks, where participants will share their own work for constructive critique. Requirement: Participants must commit to respecting the anonymity of others outside the course—this half-generative and half-workshop course will be akin to a “closed” 12 step meeting, designed to foster a safe space for honest refection and discussion. In short, we will enact a slogan that one may have heard in the rooms: “What is said here, who you see here, let it stay here.” Participants will be encouraged to share what program(s) you identify with, so that we can get to know one another. This is a course for all levels of writers, ages 19+. October 22nd – November 12th; December 3rd and 10th – 6. SUNDAYS, 2:00 – 4:-00 PM PST Class is limited to 7 participants in order to give ample time for thoughtful conversations.

Press Release!

Pre-order here: https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9781573662031/there-is-only-one-ghost-in-the-world/

Two Open Doors in a Field in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Wildly grateful for this incredible review of Two Open Doors in a Field by Adedayo Agarau in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Excerpt here:

THE BODY REMEMBERS; the road remembers—everything reminds us of everything. Two Open Doors in a Field (2023), Sophie Klahr’s captivating second collection of poems, serves as a travelogue of the heart and mind, with each poem offering a postcard or snapshot of memories evoked by absence, presence, and emptiness. “Between 2015 and 2018,” Klahr’s endnote explains, she embarked on a solitary journey, driving “approximately 14,452 miles on a variety of loops between Nebraska and California” in her trusty vehicle named Crystal. Drawing on the rich tradition of American road literature, this collection echoes the spirit of adventure and introspection found in the iconic works of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1975). Although she wrote a first draft of this book on the road, Klahr’s journey is as emotional as it is physical. Two Open Doors in a Field is a profoundly personal odyssey through the landscape of memory and emotion, exploring the connections that bind us to places, people, and our past selves.

Read the full review here.

There is Only One Ghost in the World

The book I co-authored, There Is Only One Ghost in the World —- winner of the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction from Fiction Collective 2 — is now available for Pre-Order ! Those curious to see excerpts can take a look at the hashtag #ThereIsOnlyOneGhostintheWorld on Instagram. If you are interested in reviewing, please email brightdivision17@gmail.com — digital ARCs will be available soon.

First Review: Poetry Foundation

Sylee Gore has written a wonderful short review about Two Open Doors in a Field for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. Here is the review in full:

“Sophie Klahr’s second collection is so confidently crafted that the momentum of her poems carries the reader. Two Open Doors in a Field shuttles between Nebraska and California, forming a seamless warp and weft that shape the book without corseting it.

The only interiors in these poems are motel rooms and the inside of a car nicknamed Crystal. A wind is everywhere. The poet’s attention to detail makes the forgettable sacred: “boots already wet from dew.” Each word is unshowy but carefully chosen to carry intense, restrained feeling, as in “Driving through Idaho, Listening to the Radio,” which concludes:

The story of how gambling becomes ad-
   diction—loss-rush—one more night at The Red
Garter or Clearwater—familiar as
leaning bent against the pilled white bedspread,
my mouth saying Hit me. Hit me again.

In the riveting sequence “Like Nebraska,” each poem begins with a simile but feels wholly different:

He sleeps like an amber thread […]
She rustles like a stream […]
He unfolds like a lunar eclipse […]
She shifts like the word caliper […]
He rises like a gamble taken […]
She breathes like a river […]

In a crown of sonnets titled “Pass with Care,” the lines swish as they pass one another, lending the sequence great dynamism. See, for instance, this ending and beginning:

[…] white Jewish sober queer
Woman seeing America O—I
met my five-year-old trans cousin last week—
He knew himself so well it made me weep
~
(He knew himself so well it made me weep
    or was it me that I was weeping for)

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.”

Purchase the book here

Two Open Doors in a Field is here!

Get your copy today !!

Order online, or request at your local bookstore or library!

“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

“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

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.

SIGN UP today! http://www.sophieklahr.org/registration