Two Open Doors in a Field

The exploratory second collection from Klahr (Meet Me Here at Dawn) is a road poem—what the poet calls “collaged listening”—derived from voice recordings she took while driving nearly 15,000 miles back and forth between Nebraska and California over three years. Picking up signals from the radio, the landscape, and brain drift (a section of notes credits influences including Krista Tippet and Frank Stanford), these mostly free-verse sonnets consider borderless space: “Am I writing/ about the land/ or the shape/ the eye makes of the land?” (“Coda: The Hole I Dug”). In the long sequence “Like Nebraska,” each section begins with a broken simile: “He draws like a lighthouse/ Holds itself,” “He wanders like a record/ skips,” and “He digs like a grasshopper sings—/ to recall something.” Passing through harvest and blight, the driver recalls past encounters, including healing stays at a place called the Art Farm. “Pass with Care,” the linked free-verse sonnet sequence that ends the book, swells with sadness and hope: “I’d like a passenger/ Perhaps you have become my passenger/ by reading my worn car door’s flung open.” The result is a arestless, stirring examination of travel and place. (Mar.)