Big farm feelings. Lonely and windswept.
Really loved it.

Longer:

A quiet, sparse, open, lonely book about Nebraska, about roads, about being alone in a car on a road, about moving through places, looking at places, seeing or not seeing places. It’s hard to explain the feeling I got reading these poems. It’s a particular farm feeling, a feeling I associate with certain in-between seasons. The book is anchored by a long poem, ‘Like Nebraska’, which is about 50 pages. It’s made up of alternating sections, narrated or about two different speakers, one ‘he’ and one ‘she’. All the sections follow a similar structure, starting with lines like “He stands like a sailor,” “She rustles like a stream,” “He moves like leading lights—” “He wanders like a record” and “She leans like a ladder.” 

I couldn’t tell you exactly what this poem is about, except that it evokes this deep loneliness and melancholy that can be between two people, or between a person and place. Reading it made me feel like I did on a late March evening walking a wet field. It reminded me of the smell of manure on a field stretching to the horizon, or of being in an empty farmhouse kitchen on a dark morning. I don’t know how to explain it or describe it except that the sparseness of the poems, the rocking, simple movement of them, their cadence and rhythm, gave me this particular farm feeling, a feeling about being of the earth, using the earth, working with the earth, loving but also feeling disconnected from earth and place.

I assumed these speakers in this poem to be young, and I don’t know if they are, but it also gave me the feeling of dissonance—being young on a farm, being young in an empty rural place, being young and alone on a road or in a barn, these places that are of course full of young people but aren’t often written about the way other kinds of environments of youth are. 

The poems in the rest of the book all have variations of the same title, often ‘Driving Through Nevada, Listening to the Radio’ with a different state name. The whole book has this feeling of movement along empty roads and the kinds of thoughts that arise there, the meandering but also revelation that comes with looking at what is around you and thinking about it in a very physical sense. It’s about what roads can do both in the world (places of danger, logistical, practical) and in your brain and heart (a way to ease away from something, a leaving, an untangling, a way to be alone and think, an escape). It's very much a book of journey poems, poems about the movement between ideas, places, memories, loves. There are a lot of sonnets which also gives in a cohesive feel, and a particular rhythm. 

The book was written while Klahr drove thousands of miles on loops between Nebraska and California. She composed the poems first mostly by voice note and then edited them. This is so interesting, because you can really feel the driving, the motion, the endless stretches of road in the poems. They feel like road poems, not just in their subject matter but in how they roll around, how they move. It’s quite beautiful.