Meet Me Here At Dawn

by Sophie Klahr

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.

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2016

About the author

Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters Press), Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books) and ______ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books). She is the co-author of There is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective 2, 2023), winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, alongside Corey Zeller. Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and other publications.

Reviews

[John Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meet Me Here At Dawn is a beautiful book. The poet's ability to move through so much story and narrative within and between poems that are often structured as lyrics is astonishing. The poems are alive and haunting. YesYes Books is the press to be reading. Klahr is a poet to follow.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read aloud everything other than the preface in one sitting as part of my birthday celebration. Felt wonderful to have Klar's words come through my mouth.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this book of poetry front to back with the sunrise. 🌄

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...there's a girl, a bed, a gun, a fire/ You want her to be a body of water a city you can disappear// into for awhile The gun goes off and something/like a shard of glass slips, to nestle// at the edge of your eye, forever..." Many evocative items and notions come into play and nestle at the edge of the reader's eye as Sophie Klahr proceeds with this moving non-linear account of living in a human body.

[K Kelci · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fine book of contemporary poetry to read by a young, hip white female poet. Mostly poems about a love affair and some about family. I could have dug deep into each poem if I really wanted to interrogate it, but got enough out of each one to read the whole volume pretty quickly.

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 4.5 - this was a beautifully written book. Each poem really sang, and it felt new despite being very much a book of love poems, which is an impressive feat. I will definitely read more Sophie Klahr in the future.

[Caleb Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely incredible. Sophie says so much with so little, and because of her economical use of language, each word hits a little harder. great stuff.

[Zinho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, simply gorgeous.