Sophie Klahr – författare

Longlisted for 2023 Julie Suk AwardThe 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.

There is a sense that, if only the pieces could be put together in the right way, some answer to a spill of unasked questions would become clear. There is Only One Ghost in the World follows the stories of a multilayered voice broken into fragments, an intimate witness that both delicately and bluntly reveals the best and the worst in all of us. The intricately woven voice(s) embark on a kaleidoscopic investigation into the loneliness of modern American life and family relationships, exploring the truths and lies we tell one another, and why, with empathy, grief, and humility. There is spiritual significance and consequence to these investigations, knit with the opaque vein of exploring language itself, the practice of etymological study wielded as one tool of unearthing. Inherently political, there is an unavoidable violence in this work, as stories travel from the oil-slicked beaches of California and the alleys of New Orleans to the steps of the Capitol. Here: the raw nerves of gender and identity; here: the lessons of heartbreak; here: true myths and old rumors; here: legacies of art and incisors of seasons. Incompletable Venn diagrams, sibling porn stars; addiction and climate change, the lyrics of disco and taxonomy of slot machines; last meals and unearthed mummies. There is Only One Ghost in the World is a book about what happened just before you woke up, and what happened just after. And what happened next.