Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 96 pages
Dec 1 2016, ISBN 978-1-936919-42-0
About Sophie Klahr
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books). Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Blackbird, Four Way Review and other publications. She has been on the editorial staff of Gigantic Sequins since 2009, where she currently co-edits Teen Sequins. Her interdisciplinary work includes dance, drama, and sculpture. Born in Pittsburgh, she now lives mostly in Los Angeles.
Meet Me Here At Dawn by Sophie Klahr
MERCY
Walking onto the shore without a plan,
without my other mouth.
The guttural of Us:
full, a warm black sound,
born, knit—
How to leave? Thus shocked
to blossom, thus accustomed, heat-sure
and solid?
The risk grows abstract—
What offering’s expanded?
We’re past departures;
How to split again?
We eat and eat and eat
and still our hands are clean.
About Meet Me Here At Dawn
Eroticism tinged with elegy, gratitude knit with doubt; Meet Me Here At Dawn contains an unmistakably open voice. Sophie Klahr’s debut poetry collection careens from hunger to hunger. With lyric energy and narrative determination, the poems are missives sent back from a threshold, chronicling disease, the unspoken pains of family, the fabric of an extra-marital affair. “What aperture makes a woman?” Klahr asks in “One Slaughter.” In Meet Me Here At Dawn, even the unanswerable is unfaltering, every question brightly wrought and necessary.
"Sophie Klahr moves through the chambers of the mind and heart like an expert escape artist, keys hidden in the body's coverts are revealed in a 'rush of knowing,' the body's 'first breaking and entering' that feels both clandestine and disclosive. This is poetry of immense vulnerability and fierce mettle; determined, convincing and heroically alive with courage of every kind."
—D.A. Powell
"As this marvelous debut blurs the boundary between taboo and convention, secrecy and privacy, I kept thinking of Edward Hopper’s 1959 painting Excursion Into Philosophy, the way the lovers there impart a mix of longing and regret. Like Hopper, Sophie Klahr troubles the line between isolation and intimacy. The results are mature and unflinching. Meet Me Here At Dawn is bittersweet, sensual, and brilliant."
—Terrance Hayes
